The Sunday Times/ University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award - Shadow Panel result! #YoungWriterAwardShadow

Well, I've got some news...

Over the past month, with four other bloggers - Anne Cater of Random Things Though My Letterbox, Linda Hill of Linda's Book Bag, Clare Reynolds of Years Of Reading Selfishly and Phoebe Williams, The Brixton Bookworm - I have been reading and reviewing the nominated books for The Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award. We are the Shadow Panel, assembled to give a bloggy view on the shortlist. before the judges proper announce the official winner.

I found the standard of each dauntingly high, and they are also very different books.

Last Thursday, the shadow panellists met to decide our winner. It was all done in the offices of FMcM Associates, which - to make things even more bookish - turns out to be near King's Cross Station, through a REALLY small, scruffy door set in a larger gate - and then through a hidden yard and up a ladder. All very Harry Potter.

We were hosted by the incredibly efficient and friendly Robert Greer, who made sure tea, coffee and biscuits flowed, and we were kept on task by Houman Barekat whose main aim was I think to ensure we did, actually, choose a single winner (no Booker shenanigans here, thank you very much). He excelled at this - as well as keeping us to time and on task (put a group of bloggers together unmoderated and you know what'll happen).

But - despite the biscuits and Houman's gentle guidance - it was, as I have said, HARD. The books on the shortlist are ALL GOOD.

VERY GOOD. Here, as a reminder, they are - in the order we discussed them, that is, alphabetically by author.

The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus (Penned in the Margins) has been described as "an extraordinary debut from a young British-Jamaican poet. The Perseverance is a book of loss, language and praise. One of the most crucial new voices to emerge from Britain, Raymond Antrobus explores the d/Deaf experience, the death of his father and the failure to communicate. Ranging across history, time zones and continents, The Perseverance operates in the in betweens of dual heritages, of form and expression emerging to show us what it means to exist, and to flourish."

I reviewed The Perseverance here. It is a fascinating and enlightening collection of poems with a very strong voice throughout, staking a claim against ensure and marginalisation. It deserves to be widely read.

You can buy The Perseverance from your local bookshop, from Hive Books, Waterstones or Amazon.

salt slow by Julie Armfield (Picador) is a "brilliantly inventive and haunting debut collection of stories, [in which] Julia Armfield explores bodies and the bodily, mapping the skin and bones of her characters through their experiences of isolation, obsession, love and revenge. Teenagers develop ungodly appetites, a city becomes insomniac overnight, and bodies are diligently picked apart to make up better ones.

The mundane worlds of schools and sleepy sea-side towns are invaded and transformed, creating a landscape which is constantly shifting to hold on to its inhabitants. Blurring the mythic and the gothic with the everyday, salt slow considers characters in motion – turning away, turning back or simply turning into something new entirely."

These are stories that centre young women's experiences, that take the time to express their feelings, indeed to personify those feelings. They have an eerie sense of being at the same time in the mundane world and also somewhere quite different - with the combination being totally compatible, totally to be expected, something to be lived with and through. Taken together this is a strong collection, and a joy to read.

My review of salt slow is here. You can buy salt slow from your local bookshop, from Hive Books, Waterstones or Amazon.




Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler (fleet) is "A bold debut novel exploring the nuances and the spaces between ourselves and our bodies, told through the shards collected by our own stubborn archivist. When your mother considers another country home, it’s hard to know where you belong. When the people you live among can’t pronounce your name, it’s hard to know exactly who you are. And when your body no longer feels like your own, it’s hard to understand your place in the world. This is a novel of growing up between cultures, of finding your space within them and of learning to live in a traumatized body. Our stubborn archivist tells her story through history, through family conversations, through the eyes of her mother, her grandmother and her aunt and slowly she begins to emerge into the world, defining her own sense of identity."

I found the book's playfulness with form a joy to read, perfectly matching the subject and themes by depicting the gaps and crossovers between languages, cultures and experiences. It documents some dark experiences and times, as well as the joy of family life lived well, and made excellent reading.

My review is here. You can buy Stubborn Archivist from your local bookshop, from Hive Books, Waterstones or Amazon.

The fourth book on the shortlist was Testament by Kim Sherwood (riverrun), introduced thus: 'The letter was in the Blue Room - her grandfather’s painting studio, where Eva spent the happier days of her childhood. After his death, she is the one responsible for his legacy - a legacy threatened by the letter she finds. It is from the Jewish Museum in Berlin. They have found the testimony her grandfather gave after surviving the labour camps in Austria. And, since he was one of Britain’s greatest twentieth century artists, they want to exhibit it. But Joseph Silk - leaving behind József Zyyad - remade himself long ago. As Eva begins to uncover the truth, she understands the trauma, and the lies, that have haunted her family. She will unravel what happened to József and his brother, who came to England as refugees. One never spoke of his past - the other couldn’t let it go. Their story - and that of the woman they both loved - is in her hands. Revealing it would change her grandfather’s hard- won identity. But it could also change the tide of history. This testament can lend words to wordless grief, and teach her how to live."

For me, Testament is a book that beautifully masters what it is trying to say, shows what has been and what the consequences can be. I loved the characters in this book, their flaws and their struggles, and felt that it truly honoured those who suffered and those who inherited aspects of that suffering. It's also a book which has, because it must have, warnings for us, warning not to forget, warnings to be on guard, to keep watch.

My review is here. You can buy Testament from your local bookshop, from Hive Books, Waterstones or Amazon.

So - how could we compare these books? There were so many differences and similarities. A book of poems, focusing very strongly on identity and family. Short stories making visible and real the dislocations and tensions of modern life. A novel about family and belonging and not belonging, often veering into the poetic and also based firmly in identity. A novel about family lost and regained, survival and consequences and, again, identity lost, captured, remoulded.

The only way, we felt, was to take them as books. How far did each achieve what it set out to do? Did it make sense to compare it to other books of the same type or was it too distinctive for that to work? What did we think about the language? We all had different reading experiences and focusses and this was useful in putting the books in context.  We had also read each others' reviews and sometimes found that another panel member our own feelings into words better than we could ourselves. So we gave our views, in turn, on each book, after which Houman summed up. Then, we had a general discussion after which we voted on the winner.

The books are, as I have said, all of a very high standard and any one of them would have been a worthy winner, but at the end of our fiendish judging process we decided that the winning book for the 2019 Sunday Times/ University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award would be...

#Review - salt slow by Julia Armfield #YoungWriterAwardShadow

Cover design by Ami Smithson,
Picador Art Department

salt slow
Julia Armfield
Picador, 30 May 2019
HB, e, 193pp

This is my final review as part of shadow judging the The Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award. I am part of the Shadow Panel which will make its own choice from the shortlist for the award.

The four shortlisted books are Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler (Fleet/ Little, Brown), Testament by Kim Sherwood (riverrun), The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus (Penned in the Margins) and salt slow by Julia Armfield (Picador).

About the Author

Julia Armfield lives and works in London. She is a fiction writer and occasional playwright with a Masters in Victorian Art and Literature from Royal Holloway University. Her work has been published in Lighthouse, Analog Magazine, Neon Magazine and The Stockholm Review. She was commended in the Moth Short Story Prize 2017, longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Prize 2018 and is the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize 2018.

About the Book

In her brilliantly inventive and haunting debut collection of stories, Julia Armfield explores bodies and the bodily, mapping the skin and bones of her characters through their experiences of isolation, obsession, love and revenge. Teenagers develop ungodly appetites, a city becomes insomniac overnight, and bodies are diligently picked apart to make up better ones.

The mundane worlds of schools and sleepy sea-side towns are invaded and transformed, creating a landscape which is constantly shifting to hold on to its inhabitants. Blurring the mythic and the gothic with the everyday, salt slow considers characters in motion – turning away, turning back or simply turning into something new entirely.

My Review

salt slow is a collection of Armfield's short stories, mostly with a fantastical element. There are nine stories in all, which in varying ways make a metaphor, an inner condition or aspect of being real. That might mean losing the ability to sleep when that sleep takes physical form and steps away, incarnating a Valkyrie-like feminine force as a rock group on tour or expressing the tension and mourning of one's parents breaking up by taking on the nature of a wolf. They're stories that centre young women's experiences, that take the time to express their feelings, indeed to personify those feelings.

Every one of the stories is a joy to read. My favourite was Formerly Feral which begins 'When the woman who lived across the road adopted a wold and brought it to live with her...' It just gets - beautifully, richly - stranger from there. The words 'adopted' and 'live with' mean a bit more than they sound. The wolf is treated as a daughter, dressed and bathed. At the same time there's no twee anthropomorphism, the narrator quotes handbooks and articles which advise against wold-ownership and the book makes a lot of its animalism, from the smell to the biting. At the same time it explores the affinity between the narrator, whose parents have split, and the animal, blurring the boundaries between the two and finding unexpected common ground. I just loved this story.

Mantis is a closely observed story of a young woman in adolescence, her experiences at school, her
hopes and fears and thoughts about life, boys and her body - framed as a concern over having bad skin. All sorts of applications and treatments are tried, and family history evoked: the (never named) narrator's family is invoked, it's a genetic thing, and we hear about her grandmother (a 'party girl'). Is that genetic as well? Is that why the references to a grandfather are so enigmatic ('Your Granddad wasn't around by that time'). I thought I could see the fantastical premise that was coming, but it's a tribute to the power of Armfield's writing that even as it looms she keeps a balance between the believable, psychologically right feeling of her narrator and the ultimate destination of the story. It all fits together.

In The Great Awake, Janey narrates a worldwide change, as one by one, city-dwellers lose their Sleep. That is, a part of them steps away. The Sleeps are like silent, annoying houseguests who lurk, never speaking, rearranging one's books or studying the rugs or bickering with each other - but their visibility, their separateness, denies their (what? Owners?) the ability to sleep at all. It doesn't happen to everyone, not at once, and those who are missed begin to feel left out. Like a milder version of a John Wyndham catastrophe, Armfield draws out the implications of having the Sleeps around, the 24 hour society that forms, the dilemmas and betrayals that results, and the personal impact.

The Collectables is... kind of a horror story. A group of women, graduate students, sharing a house, order pizza and decry the men who have, in various ways, treated them badly. But, they admit, those men all had some good features. Isn't it a pity you can't take just those things and put them together in a single man? Given the crossover here between yearning emotional truth and the real, that poses a challenge which one of the women takes up.

Stop Your Women's Ears with Wax is - as the title suggests - somewhat myth influenced. Mona is a filmmaker attached with an all-women band on tour. As the coach slogs from Manchester to Liverpool, over the sea to Ireland, to York, to London, a strangeness sets in. Gruesome events happen in the tour's wake, and the group's female fans rampage. Details blur - Mona's not sure how she joined the tour - and anyone who crosses them suffers misfortunes. Again in this story Armfield holds the mundane and the mythic in balance, crossing glimpses of the strange with streetlights and motorway services at 2am.

In Granite, men are fragile, hard to love because they 'are not built to withstand the same internal pressures'. Nevertheless, Maggie fall for one - late, and she never thought it would happen. Will she be careful enough with him? Can she? I think this story beatifically exposes the fragility and delicacy of a relationship, despite (or because of) it being all-consuming, and the helplessness one faces in the faces of the the world, of others outside who will impress their own presuppositions on it.

Smack does a similar thing. It has less of the fantastical about it than many of the stories here - the sudden stranding of thousands of jellyfish aside, but that is a real thing that happens - as it focusses on Nicola. Following divorce, she has holed up in her ex's beach house - literally, she's locked herself in with food and plans to withstand a siege. With nothing to do - the power has been cut off - she explores the relationship and where it went wrong.

In Cassandra After, the narrator's girlfriend returns to her one night... from the grave. ('Mt mother had always told me it was better not to answer the door between midnight and three am') Peeling skin and with holes in her, she engages in polite conversation and we see in capsule a history of the relationship. The tone of the story is exquisitely calibrated, the narrator not so much shocked or scared as embarrassed.

salt slow, the titular story off the collection is a little different from most of the rest in that it takes place in a visibly strange, deranged world. The lather stories feature disturbances, fantasy elements, in a normal, rational world (and one of Armfield's accomplishments is to keep this sense of "normality" even as weird things go on) but in salt slow, the world itself has turned strange. We are in some kind of post-apocalyptic setting where the world is flooded and a man and woman survive in a boat, scavenging what they can from the water (iffy, because the saline appears to be dying) or fro other survivors. Again though there is that talent for preserving some kind of normality between thew two, which here seems to mean avoiding the big questions: What has happened? What do we do? As things get stranger and stranger though there must - we think - come a point when that can't be maintained...

Taken together this is a strong collection of stories. They have an eerie sense of being at the same time in the mundane world and also somewhere quite different - with the combination being totally compatible, totally to be expected, something to be lived with and through.

A very enjoyable book.

#Review The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus #YoungWriterAwardShadow

Cover design by Daniel Benneworth-Gray

The Perseverance
Raymond Antrobus
Penned in the Margins, 1 October 2018
PB, 91pp

This is my third (of four) reviews as part of shadow judging the The Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award. I am part of the Shadow Panel which will make its own choice from the shortlist for the award.

The four shortlisted books are Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler (Fleet/ Little, Brown), Testament by Kim Sherwood (riverrun), The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus (Penned in the Margins) and salt slow by Julia Armfield (Picador).

About the Author

Raymond Antrobus was born in Hackney to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Complete Works III and Jerwood Compton Poetry. He is one of the world’s first recipients of an MA in Spoken Word Education from Goldsmiths, University of London. Raymond is a founding member of Chill Pill and Keats House Poets Forum. He has had multiple residencies in deaf and hearing schools around London, as well as Pupil Referral Units. In 2018 he was awarded the Geoffrey Dearmer Award by the Poetry Society (judged by Ocean Vuong). The Perseverance (Penned in the Margins, 2018), was a Poetry Book Society Choice, the winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Ted Hughes Award, and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

About the Book

"An extraordinary debut from a young British-Jamaican poet, The Perseverance is a book of loss, language and praise. One of the most crucial new voices to emerge from Britain, Raymond Antrobus explores the d/Deaf experience, the death of his father and the failure to communicate. Ranging across history, time zones and continents, The Perseverance operates in the in betweens of dual heritages, of form and expression emerging to show us what it means to exist, and to flourish."


My Review

The Perseverance (named, Antrobus explains in a note, after the London pub where his father used to drink) is a collection of twenty nine poems. In form they range from traditional poems to paragraphs of poetic text to scattered, bare words. There is a dense, angry reversal of a Ted Hughes poem written after Hughes had visited a Deaf school, Hughes' words blocked out in a commentary on his thoughts about the Deaf pupils (look to the next poem, After Reading 'Deaf School' by the Mississippi River for specifics: it refers back scathingly to Hughes' poem and makes a connection with the way French settlers usurped and overwrote the language and land of the indigenous people of the Mississippi region).

In places the verse is supplemented by sign, very sparing, but enough to remind those who don't sign of the other side of the language divide. In others, Antrobus seeks to reproduce the experience of hearing, or speaking, as a Deaf person - the first poem, Echo, begins with the whistling of his ear amps 'as if singing/ to Echo, Goddess of noise' and goes on to recount his  own attempts as a child to pronounce his family name 'as 'Antrob' (he doesn't hear 'bus'). Echo is a kind of introduction, leading to the moment that Antrobus's Deafness is identified and hinting at some of the themes of this book - for example family.

Family is central here, especially Antrobus's relationship with is father and his father's history. It is, I think ambivalent, as shown in The Perseverance where his father disappears into the pub for a drink (or drinks) eventually popping out to give his sone 50p. This is a particularly beautiful poem, as well as being particularly sad. Other poems explore Antrobus's father's illness and dementia as well as his father's Jamaican heritage and the impact on him: half English, half Jamaican. And family remain back in Jamaica too.

It's a very keenly observed book, a sharpened book in some places, skewering particular injustices such as the killing of a Black Deaf man by US police (Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris: the 'two guns' referring to the ASL sign for 'Alive') or Antrobus's treatment by US border officials (Miami Airport - a poem where the words literally sublime, turning into a cloud of fragments which both conveys how they may come over to a Deaf person and also shows up the unfairness, the fractured logic and weird presuppositions of a basically racist worldview. Sorry, that sounds very pompous. Just read the poem!)

As well as being inspired by contemporary events and themes Antrobus also looks at Deaf people in history - finding stories for example in Dickens. Doctor Marigold Re-evaluated doesn't give Dickens the same treatment as Ted Hughes but it does very elegantly point up the able-ism of the original story. One of the things about this book that is so impressive is the range of material covered, and the amount of information it imparts - for example, The Shame of Mabel Gardiner Hubbards, who was Deaf and married Alexander Graham Bell.

This is a fascinating and enlightening collection of poems with a very strong voice throughout, staking a claim against ensure and marginalisation. It deserves to be widely read.

#Review - Testament by Kim Sherwood #YoungWriterAwardShadow

Cover design by Andrew Smith

Testament
Kim Sherwood
riverrun, 12 July 2018
PB, 455pp

This is my second (of four) reviews as part of shadow judging the The Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award. I am part of the Shadow Panel which will make its own choice from the shortlist for the award.

The four shortlisted books are Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler (Fleet/ Little, Brown), Testament by Kim Sherwood (riverrun), The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus (Penned in the Margins) and salt slow by Julia Armfield (Picador).

About the Author

Kim Sherwood was born in Camden in 1989 and lives in Bath. She studied Creative Writing at UEA and is now Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England. Her pieces have appeared in Mslexia, Lighthouse, and Going Down Swinging. Kim began researching and writing Testament, her first novel, after her grandfather, the actor George Baker, passed away and her grandmother began to talk about her experiences as a Holocaust Survivor for the first time. It won the 2016 Bath Novel Award, was longlisted for the 2019 Desmond Elliot Prize and shortlisted for the 2019 Author’s Club Best First Novel Award.

About the Book

'The letter was in the Blue Room - her grandfather’s painting studio, where Eva spent the happier days of her childhood. After his death, she is the one responsible for his legacy - a legacy threatened by the letter she finds. It is from the Jewish Museum in Berlin. They have found the testimony her grandfather gave after surviving the labour camps in Austria. And, since he was one of Britain’s greatest twentieth century artists, they want to exhibit it. But Joseph Silk - leaving behind József Zyyad - remade himself long ago. As Eva begins to uncover the truth, she understands the trauma, and the lies, that have haunted her family. She will unravel what happened to József and his brother, who came to England as refugees. One never spoke of his past - the other couldn’t let it go. Their story - and that of the woman they both loved - is in her hands. Revealing it would change her grandfather’s hard- won identity. But it could also change the tide of history. This testament can lend words to wordless grief, and teach her how to live."

My review

Testament is one of those books which begins with a story that seems small, personal and intimate and then, almost without you realising, blossoms, expands and acquires wider resonance, deeper relevance and added meaning. While still remaining, in a sense, small, personal and intimate.

Eva is devoted to her elderly grandfather, artist Joseph Silk (Jószef Zyyad to some), who, as a young man, survived the horrors of wartime Hungary. As a Jew, he was enslaved, tortured, marched from camp to camp in the dying days of the war and lost his parents and sister, afterwards making a life for himself in England. Silk's (as he is generally referred to) choice was then to turn his back on the past, on the family he lost, the country that is no longer his own, the house he grew up in, everything from before. he certainly never wanted to tale part in reunions, contribute his testimony to museums, or to explore what was lost.

Granddaughter Eva, close to Silk and feeling herself rejected by her father John, is keen to protect Silk's legacy and reputation but most of all perhaps, his privacy. Approached by curators, journalists and art historians who want something of this eminent figure, this eminent survivor, she asks herself what Silk would want - and then closes down, even as she's dealing with the sale of his house and studio and the need to decide what should happen to everything, to decide how Silk should be marked in the world (even the text for a gravestone is impossible to settle). Inevitably that can't, in the end, hold, and Eva embarks reluctantly on a search for the truth, her easy trust in and love for Silk eroded by the discovery that he told her lies, lies, lies.

This is then a story about survival. While we are shown episodes from the Holocaust - those affecting Jószef, his brother László, and a young woman Zuzka - and these are very grim, the story is necessarily  selective there (I don't think what we told is by any means the worst that happened) and really focusses, I think, on what happened after, when the three young survivors are brought to England, to the Lake District of all places. We see, slowly, the dilemma they face.

The need for safety and security. The alienness of this damp land, a country of grey streets and chilly attics. The ambivalence of the English who haven't suffered as Jószef, László and Zuzka have but who are the victors, the owners, in their own country, of the war, as it were. (And among whom there is still prejudice - anti Jewish, anti foreigner).

But also, rejection by a Hungary that joined in the Nazi purges and doesn't want them now, offers nothing, no family, no restored home, no life. (In the modern parts of this book, that's paralleled by the scary resurge in Hungary of the far Right with its attempts to airbrush history).

The three survivors find, in the end, different responses to this dilemma. I'm not going to say any more about what they are because Eva's discovery of all this is an important part of the story, for her and for her father - but none of them come without cost. And we see that while John. and Eva may be second and third generation survivors, they are still survivors and the ripples of what happened to a father and a grandfather spread out to affect subsequent generations.

It's a cleverly written book, balancing an account of what happened in the 1940s and after - which, we need to keep remembering, can't be known to Eva because she hasn't been told things, she's been lied to, the witnesses are dead - with one set in the present day, taking in Eva's mourning silk, her doubts about herself and her father, her excitement at discovering Berlin and Budapest and in them, a couple of young men. Despite the aspects of the book that expose suffering and death, there is a great sense of life in Testament, not only in the modern parts but in the lives of the young refugees in Ambleside or the Jewish community in London (on the cusp of moving from the East End to North London).

Testament is a book that beautifully masters what it is trying to say, shows what has been and what the consequences can be. I loved the characters in this book, their flaws and their struggles, and felt that it truly honoured those who suffered and those who inherited aspects of that suffering.

It's also a book which has, because it must have, warnings for us, warning not to forget, warnings to be on guard, to keep watch.

For more information about the book, see the publisher's website here

#Review Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler #YoungWriterAwardShadow

Jacket design by Nico Taylor

Stubborn Archivist
Yara Rodrigues Fowler
Fleet/ Little Brown, 21 February 2019
HB, 362pp

This is the first of four reviews I'm doing as part of shadow judging the The Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award. I am part of the Shadow Panel which will make its own choice from the shortlist for the award.

The four shortlisted books are Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler (Fleet/ Little, Brown), Testament by Kim Sherwood (riverrun), The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus (Penned in the Margins) and salt slow by Julia Armfield (Picador).

About the author

Yara Rodrigues Fowler is a British Brazilian novelist from South London. Stubborn Archivist, published in 2019 in the UK and USA, is her first novel. It was called ’stunning’ by Olivia Laing, ‘visceral and elegant’ by Claire-Louise Bennett and ‘breathtakingly written’ by Nikesh Shukla. Yara was named one of The Observer’s nine ‘hottest-tipped’ debut novelists of 2019 and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. Yara is also a trustee of Latin American Women’s Aid, an organisation that runs the only two refuges in Europe for and by Latin American women. She’s writing her second novel now, for which she received the John C Lawrence Award from the Society of Authors towards research in Brazil.

About the book

"A bold debut novel exploring the nuances and the spaces between ourselves and our bodies, told through the shards collected by our own stubborn archivist. When your mother considers another country home, it’s hard to know where you belong. When the people you live among can’t pronounce your name, it’s hard to know exactly who you are. And when your body no longer feels like your own, it’s hard to understand your place in the world. This is a novel of growing up between cultures, of finding your space within them and of learning to live in a traumatized body. Our stubborn archivist tells her story through history, through family conversations, through the eyes of her mother, her grandmother and her aunt and slowly she begins to emerge into the world, defining her own sense of identity."

My review

Stubborn Archivist is a novel exploring the experiences and identity of a young woman of Brazilian-English heritage. Born in London to a Brazilian mother and an English father, she, the archivist of the title (which is I think an allusion to her role in observing her family) narrates her early life (borrowing from family stories) and her memories of travelling to Brazil for family reunions at Christmas. We see her growing up in early 00s London, leaving for university, making and falling out of friendships and always, always, returning to Brazil.

It's all beautifully, even poetically portrayed but it's impossible to convey that with a carefully selected quote or two because - and this is the first thing I need to say about Stubborn Archivist  - the book is (for me) very experimental in its structure (or perhaps, rather, in its form?) Rodrigues Fowler delights in space, allowing her text almost to dance against the blankness - a handful of worlds will be emphasised by being printed alone at the top of a page, or bleeding down the side

one

by

one

She enthusiastically jumbles her sentences in places or runs words together, creating something much more like the patterns and rhythms of thoughts and feelings than conventional text.

There are pages with a block of text at the top and nothing after. There are words which morph into one another down the page, stretching meanings into sounds and sounds into meaning and playing to the rhythms of language (something very important in this book where there is a running point about people not being able to pronounce the Archivist's name: 'What's your name? He repeated the syl-la-bles.').

Now I thought I couldn't do with this sort of thing (trying to describe it, I realise I've probably made it seem very pretentious) and I worried, when I opened Stubborn Archivist, that it would be a barrier for me. But I found it all actually worked very well and far from being a barrier, it opened up the world of the Archivist and her family, removing the sense of distance that can be created by prose (however polished, perhaps especially if polished) and giving the book a much less formal air that complements its subjects and themes very well.

The book works on you at a different level than plot, sentences and logic, whispering through its convolved text to tell you about its themes - growing up, origins, belonging, not belonging. We are given scenes in the Archivist's life. There are events in her childhood both from her own perspective and as passed on to her by her family, for example the first visit of her Brazilian grandparents - her beloved Vovô and Vovó - to her parents' small London flat when she's a baby. We see the little surprises, the accommodations, as English and Brazilian cultures encounter one another and the ways in which they merge, jostle and accept each other, lubricated, as it were, by familial love (and with some effort, at times).

That basic picture endures as the Archivist grows up, the story taking in joyous, illicit teenage evenings out in London with her friend Jade, experiences with boys, and her exploration of her family's past. There is both acceptance and rejection of those different underlying cultures (the latter when a friendship founders as the friend wants to visit Brazil but can't shed her preconceptions), a romance that peters out, symbolised by the boyfriend wanting to impose his views over hairstyle, and, a recurring theme, the question (from both Brazilans and English) "But when did you move to London?"

It's perhaps symbolised most by the layered descriptions of the flight between England and Brazil. As a child (the first being beyond memory). As a teenager, doing it alone for the first time. As a seasoned traveller, who knows just what to pack and how, where to sit, how to make the flight work for her. And I haste, for a funeral. These layers build up, both distinct and, somehow, existing together, illuminating each other so that it's almost as if several different women are making the trip together.

In the same way, events bleed out of one context and into another and some of those more poetic renderings intercut, playing with worlds, morphing them from English to Portuguese, almost singing names and phrases. There are the different challenges laid down to the reality of this Anglo-Brazilian woman - not only the "When did you move...?" but the assumptions about her and the two sides of her family. An employer (a media organisation) seems to see her as "their Brazilian" and sets her to researching cosmetic surgery or gang violence. But at the same time, working in the staff restaurant, is Tiago, a much more interesting subject of research...

This is a book that's impossible to summarise. There are so many threads. It looks back to Brazilian politics in the 90s, with police brutality and disappearances. It takes in something that happened to the protagonist, which has left her, at some level, traumatised and uneasy, possibly with physical consequences - whatever happened is hinted at and explored here but rarely confronted, although it does seem to come to a resolution. And that stands for much of this book in a way - all those layers, those different version of the same woman, lend the story a sense of completion so that the story isn't happening in front of us, as it were, more being documented - a kind of coolness in the perspective which contrasts with the closeness from the textual style.

It was a book I found easy to read, easy to take big gulps of, so to speak, a story and a life that really grabbed attention, told with great verve and compelling attention tuition from the reader. Truly a magnificent read and I book that I think I'll go back to, one with a great deal more to give on rereading.

For more information about Stubborn Archivist see the publisher's website here.

And We're Away! #YoungWriterAwardShadow

The Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award

Following my Exciting Announcement on Wednesday that I'm a Shadow Judge for the Young Writer of the Year Award (I will never get tired of saying that) I've been almost bursting to share the news of who is on the shortlist for the award (and the Shadow Award).

I couldn't do that (I signed a scary NDA and everything)... until now!

From 9am today, 3 November, the news is out. And the books have arrived! Below is my own, very professional, photo of the collection, on my very own reading dining table. 

Just look:

Let's recap on that a bit. The shortlisted books, announced in the Sunday Times today, are 

The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus (Penned in the Margins)

Salt Slow by Julia Armfield (Picador)

Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler (Fleet/Little, Brown)

Testament by Kim Sherwood (riverrun)

I'm going to post more about each book over the next couple of weeks, including my own impressions as I read them, and before the shadow panel has its Big Meeting later this month. I have read one of the four so far but I'm not going to say which one - I'm not sure yet whether to post anything till I have read them all. We'll see. 

But here, in the meantime, is a little information about each one. I think you'll agree this is a wide-ranging, stimulating and exciting list.

The Perseverance is "the multi-award-winning debut by British-Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus. Ranging across history and continents, these poems operate in the spaces in between, their haunting lyrics creating new, hybrid territories. 

The Perseverance is a book of loss, contested language and praise, where elegies for the poet’s father sit alongside meditations on the d/Deaf experience."

Salt Slow is a "brilliantly inventive and haunting debut collection of stories...  Julia Armfield explores bodies and the bodily, mapping the skin and bones of her characters through their experiences of isolation, obsession, love and revenge.

Teenagers develop ungodly appetites, a city becomes insomniac overnight, and bodies are diligently picked apart to make up better ones. The mundane worlds of schools and sleepy sea-side towns are invaded and transformed, creating a landscape which is constantly shifting to hold on to its inhabitants. Blurring the mythic and the gothic with the everyday, Salt Slow considers characters in motion – turning away, turning back or simply turning into something new entirely."

In Stubborn Archivist "...the debut novelist Yara Rodrigues Fowler uses dialogue to sketch out a young woman's awkward attempts to articulate and reconcile different aspects of who she is... 

The novel ends with a tiny movement, a moment of discovery all the more tantalising for remaining largely unexpressed, and this is undoubtedly the novel's strength: its ability to show something momentous - about cultural identity, sexual violence, racial prejudice - without seeming to say anything at all" [TLS]

In Testament  "...Of everyone in her complicated family, Eva was closest to her grandfather: a charismatic painter – and a keeper of secrets. So when he dies, she’s hit by a greater loss – of the questions he never answered, and the past he never shared.

It’s then she finds the letter from the Jewish Museum in Berlin. They have uncovered the testimony he gave after his forced labour service in Hungary, which took him to the death camps and then to England as a refugee. This is how he survived.

But there is a deeper story that Eva will unravel – of how her grandfather learnt to live afterwards. As she confronts the lies that have haunted her family, their identity shifts and her own takes shape. The testament is in her hands."

So, we have two novels, a collections of poems, and a short story collection. All very tantalising and right now - that's all I can say. I'm going to be finding out more about these books over the next few weeks and I hope you will as well. But if you're already read any of them, why not share your thoughts in a comment?

For more about the The Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award, see the award's website here. 

An exciting announcement!

Well I'm excited - today I'm able to share a secret I've been sitting on for a little while - I'm going to be a judge!

Not one in a wig and gown, a shadow judge

To stop mystifying, I've been asked, along with some really cool book bloggers (Anne Cater, Linda Hill, Clare Reynolds and Phoebe Williams) to be on the Shadow Panel for the The Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award. (So it's four really cool bloggers, and me).

The Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award is an annual award of £5,000 for the best book across all categories (fiction, poetry, non fiction, you name it) published in the last year by a writer under 35. The list of previous winners is spectacular: Sally Rooney and Max Porter in recent years, to Zadie Smith, Sarah Waters and Robert MacFarlane in the past, amongst many others. For all the details , including the 2018 shortlist and judges, see youngwriteraward.com

I'm not judging that!

As I said, we are shadow judges (which sounds good in a kind of Avengers Assemble, who-is-the-superhero, kind of way). For the fourth year, in 2019, there is a shadow panel of bloggers choosing our own winner from the shortlist.  Last year the shadow panel comprised Amanda Chatterton, Paul Cheney, Susan Osborne, Lucy Pearson and Lizzi Risch and their winner was The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gower.

So, no wig and gown but as you can imagine, I've been pretty excited about this since I was asked. I have always found blogging great fun: ploughing through the books, sharing what I think, perhaps #BookTempting a bit - that is, persuading someone to add to their already towering TBR. Best of all is the feeling you get when you've put the right person on the track of the right book. But it can be a solitary business, so to be taking part in something based on working with a group of other bloggers is a tempting prospect. And getting the opportunity to meet those great bloggers.

You can read about more all the shadow panelists, announced today,  HERE

http://www.youngwriteraward.com/2019-shadow-panel-revealed

Anyway, what it comes down to is...

...we have to read some books...

....think about them...

...and meet to which one should win.

Some blogging will also be involved along the way - I'll be sharing my thoughts about the shortlisted books as I go (I know what's on the shortlist but you, dear reader, will have to wait till it's announced on 3 November).

It looks like being great fun, and I'm looking forward to engaging with the books. Our verdict is announced on 28 November, ahead of the The Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award itself.

So - watch this space, and the Shadow panel hashtag #YoungWriterAwardShadow!