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| Lionel Shriver |
Three years after controversial speech in Brisbane, US author denounces cultural ‘control’, ‘obedience’ and ‘conformism’
Debbie ZhouThree years after vowing never to return to Australia, author Lionel Shriver says she stands by her controversial keynote speech at the Brisbane writers’ festival in 2016, calling identity politics “fascistic”.
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| Author Lionel Shriver has written several novels including The Post-Birthday World and We Need to Talk About Kevin |
Writer Lionel Shriver has accused publisher Penguin Random House of putting diversity ahead of quality.
It says new authors should reflect the UK population by 2025, "taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability".
The company said: "Books shape our culture, and this should not be driven only by people who come from a narrow section of society."
This is the full transcript of the keynote speech, Fiction and Identity Politics, that author Lionel Shriver gave at the Brisbane Writers Festival
Tue 13 September 2016
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| Jessie Burton |
The Miniaturist author Jessie Burton shares her experience and advice on how to be a writer
• I started being a writer very young. I’d write poems and short stories, and at school, plays for us all to perform. I wrote through all my time at university, but what I wrote before was better because it was more me.
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| Jessie Burton |
Readers of Burton’s fiction may notice the continuation of a theme, as The Muse similarly began with a young woman being employed as a typist by an inscrutable female art historian. It’s perhaps also worth noting that Burton herself worked as a PA in the City before the publication in 2014 of her million-selling debut, The Miniaturist, so has first-hand experience of supporting herself in a menial role while quietly composing a piece of art.
A double portrait of hidden creativity set in swinging 60s London and civil war Spain from a writer who cannot be faulted for ambition
Anthony Quinn
Saturday 25 June 2016
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n 1686 18-year-old Nella Oortman, a country girl of good birth but straitened circumstances, is married to Johannes Brandt, a wealthy merchant trader twice her age, and dispatched to his luxurious house in Amsterdam. Hopeful of love, Nella is soon disappointed: Brandt is indifferent to her, his domineering sister terse and disdainful. Even the outspoken servants confound Nella's provincial expectations. Lonely and unoccupied, Nella is at first angered by her husband's extravagant wedding gift, a perfect facsimile of her new home in miniature, which she regards as a cruel joke, a mockery of her powerlessness in the household. However, her curiosity piqued by an advertisement, she commissions a miniaturist to create a few small items to furnish the house. The tiny creations she receives are not only exquisite, they bear an uncanny resemblance to their real-life counterparts, suggesting that the miniaturist knows every detail not only of the house itself but the secrets of its occupants.
When the shock-rocker returned to the place of his birth in the 60s, he found a raw paradise of unsegregated rock’n’roll. As Cooper releases an album celebrating the city, he and his peers relive one of the US’s greatest music scenes
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Cooper’s new album Detroit Stories celebrates the city he was born in and that made his name, full of songs that evoke the spirit of Detroit’s 1960s rock’n’roll scene, where the bands were faster, harder and tougher than in any other American city, and the records sounded like they were recorded with everything pushed into the red. “You had to come on stage in Detroit with attitude, and that’s what crowds loved,” recalls Cooper, now 73. “For some reason, that midwest mentality was not sophisticated at all. It was tribal and kind of sexual. Here’s the difference: in Los Angeles, if a Detroit act was in town, people would come home from work, put on their torn-up Levis, put on a black leather jacket, and try to look like they belonged. In Detroit, they’d just go from work like that because that’s the way they dressed; they had combat boots on. There was nothing phoney about it. So if you were a Detroit band, you better bring it or you’re not going to be there.”
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| Megan Nolan: ‘I found it hard to come back to Dublin because I’d really messed my life up there.’ Photograph: Linda Nylind/ |
The novelist talks about the heartache and hedonism that inspired her debut – and how writing helped her find a way out of the chaos of young adult life
Alex ClarkM
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| Megan Nolan |
“That”, she elaborates, is not exactly the sexual explicitness of Acts of Desperation’s depiction of a young woman’s life in Dublin, nor even its portrayal of prodigious boozing and partying, “but just that it’s so unhappy. You know, it’s quite a painful book to read. I just think, ‘I wish I could have given them a good experience.’”
Perfect reading for fans of Raven Leilani and Jenny Offill, Brown’s incendiary debut investigates the stories we tell ourselves about race and class through the burgeoning realisations of a young Black British woman.
DEAD SOULS follows the course of a single big night – most of which is spent in the bar at the Travelodge just off Waterloo Bridge. There the unnamed narrator meets Solomon Wiese, a poet who has been ostracized by the community after failing to pass a technology-based authenticity test. Solomon Wiese’s account of his rise and fall is a story that takes him the entire night and the remainder of the novel to tell. It is a story that touches on – amongst many other things – childhood encounters with ‘nothingness’, a retreat to the east of England, a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost, and Wiese’s plans for a triumphant return to the capital, through the theft of poems, illegal war profits and faked social media accounts – plans in which the narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated…
Open Water
by Caleb Azumah
Caleb Azumah Nelson. Image: Stuart Simpson
There are great loves, and then there’s the love in Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water. It’s the story of a photographer and a dancer, whose connection is instant. But as they navigate being Black in a hostile world, and come to terms with grief and loss, their happily ever after is challenged.
Azumah Nelson, who cites Zadie Smith as an inspiration (her novel NW and her writing in general is referred to multiple times by the characters), lost three grandparents, his godfather and an aunt in the year leading up to writing Open Water. He was also working on a collection of essays on a variety of subjects, from music to art to mourning.
"It was a lot, a really heavy time in which I felt like I was in a cloud of my own grief,” he says. "The essays came about as I was trying to afford my grief, and in turn, myself, more form and detail. I didn’t want to feel so hazy anymore. So I was spending a lot of the time at libraries, gallery spaces, cinemas, concerts, trying to go past the level of knowing, towards feeling, and asking where those feelings come from. That’s a question which is written throughout Open Water. How do you feel?”
The characters emotions and feelings are palpable, and love touches every sentence of the novel. Azumah Nelson says he learnt “how wonderful and freeing love can be” while writing the book, adding: "There’s a level of vulnerability which love demands. To ask someone to see you is to ask someone to see all of you and trusting someone with all of you can be difficult. To see all this beauty and rhythm and joy but also to see your uglier parts, your pain, your grief. But it’s wonderful when it does happen, when you are no longer being looked at, but being seen.”
Open Water is clearly a very personal novel for Azumah Nelson, who says that he had to make himself vulnerable to write it.
"There’s a poet, Morgan Parker, who talks about her process, of ‘digging so deep you touch bone’,” he says. "I feel like I did this and then some. It is a joy to write but at times, quite heartbreaking. I guess, I’d love for readers not just to know what I’m saying, but to feel it too. The book is written in the second person so it’s very intimate, and in that way when a question is asked, I’m asking both myself and the reader. When I’m asking, How do you feel? That question comes both ways."
"I had exited a string of unhealthy romantic dynamics in my mid-20s and felt totally traumatised and blindsided by the way that both my partners and I had behaved,” Megan Nolan says about the time leading up to the writing of Acts of Desperation.
"Because I was so hurt by them it was easy for me to cast myself as the victim, but when I calmed down and really thought about them it was almost as though neither party had acted with any considered agency; it was more like this perfect storm of circumstances and defensive reaction that led to the hurt, rather than one person being the aggressor and one the receiver.
A young woman’s nightmare slowly emerges during a day at the office in this unflinching tale of sexual violence
Heloise WoodJ
Weidenfeld & Nicolson has bought a "poetic and political" debut literary novel about the English identity crisis.
Lee Brackstone acquired world all language rights in The Paper Lantern by Will Burns from Becky Thomas at Johnson & Alcock. Foreign rights sales have already been concluded with Nijgh & Van Ditmar in Holland and Penguin Random House in Spain.
Set in Buckinghamshire in a village adjacent to the Chequers estate, The Paper Lantern follows a single narrator as he charts the shifts in mood and understanding that have defined the lockdown period, while simultaneously interrogating both his own history and that of the surrounding area.
Editor Brackstone said: "It is incredibly rare to find a literary novel that speaks to and for the moment with rigorous intelligence and elegance but The Paper Lantern is a miraculously relevant book – not only to the UK but internationally, as we see governments failing and the social fabric of our shared world under threat, from populism to climate disaster. Poetic and political in equal measure, it is a poignant novel about our symbolic unravelling and failings as a nation. Will Burns is a new literary novelist of extraordinarily intuitive gifts."
Burns is a poet and writer based in Buckinghamshire. In 2014 he was named a Faber & Faber New Poet, and since then he has also published poetry pamphlets with Clutag Press, Rough Trade Books and his first full collection, Country Music, with Offord Road Books in 2020. He is also a long-time contributor to the online nature writing journal Caught by the River. He said: "The truth is I’m as surprised as I am happy to find myself thinking about the publication of this book after the last year or so, which has obviously been so difficult and strange in so many ways. Writing this felt like the only substantial, real thing going on in that rather unreal period of the strict lockdown restrictions. To be working with [Brackstone] and everyone at W&N is hugely exciting."
The Paper Lantern will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on 1st July 2021 in hardback, e-book and audio.
Canongate has snapped up a debut literary novel, which imagines the life of King Lear's wife in the "vein of feminist alternative histories such as Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad or Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls".
Commissioning editor Jo Dingley acquired world rights including audio to Learwife by J R Thorp from Claire Paterson Conrad at Janklow & Nesbit. Learwife will publish in May 2021.
Taking inspiration from two lines in Shakespeare’s play, in which the queen is a character only mentioned twice, Learwife gives voice to "one of the most famous female characters ever written out of literary history", said the publisher.
Set in Medieval Britain, Lear’s queen has been in exile in an abbey for five years, since the birth of her youngest daughter, for an unknown offence,. After discovering the devastating deaths of her husband and daughters, the queen encourages the women of the abbey into a competition for her approval, a competition which quickly devolves into savagery.
Dingley says Thorp's first novel "reads like her 20th. It’s hard to believe that it has taken over 400 years for this vital female character to be given a voice, but Jen is just the writer to do it."
Thorp was born in Australia and is now living in Cork. She gained her PhD at the University of Oxford, where she was a Clarendon Scholar. Thorp won the London Short Story Award in 2011, has had creative work published in the Cambridge Literary Review, Manchester Review, antiTHESIS and Wave Composition. She is also a lyricist and librettist and her scores have been published by OUP and Editions Peters. She wrote the libretto for the highly acclaimed recent modern opera "Dear Marie Stopes" about the life of the birth control advocate and sex-advice writer.
Paterson Conrad said: ‘Whether you know the play or not, Learwife is one of the most exciting literary debuts that I’ve read in years."
Thorp said: "Centuries after these characters were first written, Lear and his trio of daughters still fill the stage, in theatres worldwide. But there has always been an absence: where is Lear's queen? What did she know, and why was she cut away from the famous narrative? Out of that mystery came this book, and its exploration of grief, tenderness and powerful, thwarted women."
THE BOOKSELLER
