The 2024 McKitterick Prize Shortlist and Winner
For the third year in a row, I was a first-round judge for the McKitterick Prize (for a first novel, published or unpublished, by a writer over 40), helping to assess the unpublished manuscripts. The McKitterick Prize is in memory of Tom McKitterick and sponsored by the Hawthornden Foundation. Thus far an unpublished manuscript has not advanced to the shortlist, but maybe one year it will!
On the 2024 McKitterick Prize shortlist (synopses adapted from Goodreads):
Jacqueline Crooks for Fire Rush (Jonathan Cape, Vintage, Penguin Random House) – “Set amid the Jamaican diaspora in London at the dawn of 1980s, a mesmerizing story of love, loss, and self-discovery that vibrates with the liberating power of music. When Yamaye meets Moose, a soulful carpenter who shares her Jamaican heritage, a path toward a different kind of future seems to open. But then, Babylon rushes in.”
Chidi Ebere for Now I Am Here (Pan Macmillan, Picador) – “We begin at the end. The armies of the National Defence Movement have been crushed and our unnamed narrator and his unit are surrounded. As he recounts the events leading to his disastrous finale, we learn how this gentle man is gradually transformed into a war criminal, committing acts he wouldn’t have thought himself capable.”
Aoife Fitzpatrick for The Red Bird Sings (Virago) – “West Virginia, 1897. When young Zona Heaster Shue dies only a few months after her wedding, her mother, Mary Jane, becomes convinced Zona was murdered by her husband, Trout, the town blacksmith. As the trial rises to fever pitch, with the men of Greenbrier County aligned against them, Mary Jane and Zona’s best friend Lucy must decide whether to reveal Zona’s greatest secret in the service of justice.”
Greg Jackson for The Dimensions of a Cave (Granta) – “When investigative reporter Quentin Jones’s story about covert military interrogation practices in the Desert War is buried, he is spurred to dig deeper, and he unravels a trail that leads to VIRTUE: cutting-edge technology that simulates reality during interrogation. As the shadowy labyrinths of governmental corruption unfurl and tighten around him, unnerving links to his protégé – who, like Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, disappeared in the war several years earlier – keep emerging.”
Wenyan Lu for The Funeral Cryer (Atlantic Books, Allen & Unwin) – “The Funeral Cryer long ago accepted the mundane realities of her life: avoided by fellow villagers because of the stigma attached to her job and under-appreciated by her husband, whose fecklessness has pushed the couple close to the brink of break-up. But just when things couldn’t be bleaker, she takes a leap of faith – and in so doing things start to take a surprising turn for the better.”
Allan Radcliffe for The Old Haunts (Fairlight Books) – “Recently bereaved Jamie is staying at a rural steading in the heart of Scotland with his actor boyfriend Alex. The sudden loss of both of Jamie’s parents hangs like a shadow over the trip. In his grief, Jamie finds himself sifting through bittersweet memories, from his working-class upbringing in Edinburgh to his bohemian twenties in London, with a growing awareness of his sexuality threaded through.”
The Society of Authors kindly sent me free copies of the six shortlisted novels. I already had The Red Bird Sings and The Funeral Cryer on my TBR, so I’m particularly looking forward to reading them as part of my 20 Books of Summer – which I’ve decided might as well contain, as well as all hardbacks, only books by women.
I was familiar with Fire Rush from its shortlisting for last year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. The other three titles are new to me but sound interesting, especially The Old Haunts – at 150 pages, it will be perfect for Novellas in November.
My fellow judge Rónán Hession, whom I got to meet very briefly on a Zoom call, wrote: “It is exciting to judge a prize and encounter such a depth of talent. Though [the books] hugely varied in subject matter and style, the writers on the shortlist all impressed me with the clarity of their creative vision and their narrative authority on the page.”
The winner and runner-up were announced in advance of the SoA Awards ceremony in London yesterday evening. As in other years, I watched the livestream, which this year included captivating speeches by the Very Revd Dr Mark Oakley, Dean of Southwark Cathedral (where the ceremony took place) and Kate Mosse. And what a thrill it was to see and hear my name on the livestream!
Winner: Wenyan Lu for The Funeral Cryer
Runner-up: Chidi Ebere for Now I Am Here
In the press release announcing the winners, Hession said, “Wenyan Lu has created an unforgettable debut, brimming with personality and written with a sense of consummate ease. The Funeral Cryer is such a funny, warm and original book. An absolute gem of a novel.” I can’t wait to get started!
Other notable winners announced yesterday included:
- Tom Crewe for The New Life (Betty Trask Prize for a first novel by a writer under 35)
- Jacqueline Crooks for Fire Rush (Paul Torday Memorial Prize for a first novel by a writer over 60 – how perfect for her to win this in place of the McKitterick!)
- Soula Emmanuel for Wild Geese (Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize for a novel focusing on travel)
- Cecile Pin for Wandering Souls (Runner-up for the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize; and a Somerset Maugham Award travel bursary)
Reading Ireland Month, Part II: Hughes, Kennedy, Murray
My second contribution to Reading Ireland Month after a first batch that included poetry and a novel.
Today I have a poetry collection based around science and travel, and two multi-award-winning novels, one set in the thick of the Troubles in Belfast and another about the crumbling of an ordinary suburban family.
Gathering Evidence by Caoilinn Hughes (2014)
I bought this in the same order as Patricia Lockwood’s poetry collection, thinking a segue to another genre within an author’s oeuvre (I’d enjoyed Hughes’s 2018 debut novel, Orchid & the Wasp) might be a clever strategy. That worked out with Lockwood, but not as well here. A collection about scientific discoveries and medical advances seemed likely to be up my street. “The Moon Should Be Turned” is about the future of the HeLa cells harvested from Henrietta Lacks; poems are dedicated to the Curies and Johannes Kepler and one has Fermi as a main character. Russian nuclear force is a background menace. There are also some poems about growing up in Dublin and travels in the Andes. “Vagabond Monologue” stood out for its voice, “Marbles” for its description of childhood booty: “A netted bag of green glass marbles with aquamarine swirls / deep in the otherworld of spherical transparency (simultaneous opacity) / was the first thing I ever stole when I was three and far from the last.” Elsewhere, though, I found the precision vocabulary austere and offputting. (New purchase with Amazon voucher) 
Trespasses by Louise Kennedy (2022)
Despite its many accolades, not least a shortlisting for the Women’s Prize, I couldn’t summon much enthusiasm for reading a novel about the Troubles. I don’t know why I tend to avoid this topic; perhaps it’s the insidiousness of fighting that’s not part of a war somewhere else, but ongoing domestic terrorism instead. Combine that with an affair – Cushla is a 24-year-old schoolteacher who starts sleeping with a middle-aged, married barrister she meets in her family’s pub – and it sounded like a tired, ordinary plot. But after this won last year’s McKitterick Prize (for debut authors over 40) and I was sent the whole shortlist in thanks for being a manuscript judge, I thought I should get over myself and give it a try.
Little surprise that Kennedy’s writing – compassionate, direct, heart-rending – is what sets the book apart. With no speech marks, radio reports of everyday atrocities blend in with thoughts and conversations. We meet and develop fondness for characters across classes and the Catholic–Protestant divide: Cushla’s favourite pupil, Davy, whose father was assaulted in the street; her alcoholic mother, Gina, who knows more than she lets on, despite her inebriation; Gerry, a colleague who takes Cushla on friend dates and covers for her when she goes to see Michael. An Irish language learning circle introduces the 1970s bourgeoisie with their dinner parties and opinions.
This doesn’t read like a first novel at all, with each character fully realized and the plot so carefully constructed that I was as shocked as Cushla by a revelation four-fifths of the way through. Desire is bound up with guilt; can anyone ever be happy when violence is so ubiquitous and random? “Booby trap. Incendiary device. Gelignite. Nitroglycerine. Petrol bomb. Rubber bullets. Saracen. Internment. The Special Powers Act. Vanguard. The vocabulary of a seven-year-old child now.” But a brief framing episode set in 2015 gives hope of life beyond seemingly inescapable tragedy. (Free from the Society of Authors) 
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (2023)
“The trouble is coming from inside; from his family. And unless something happens to stop it, it will keep billowing out, worse and worse”
Another great Irish novel I nearly missed out on, despite it being shortlisted for the Booker Prize and Writers’ Prize and winning the inaugural Nero Book Awards’ Gold Prize, this one because I was daunted by its doorstopper proportions. I’d gotten it in mind that it was all about money: Dickie Barnes’s car dealership is foundering and the straitened circumstances affect his whole family (wife Imelda, teenage daughter Cass, adolescent son PJ). A belated post-financial crash novel? Again, it sounded tired, maybe clichéd.
But actually, this turned out to be just the kind of wry, multi-perspective dysfunctional family novel that I love, such that I was mostly willing to excuse a baggy midsection. Murray opens with long sections of close third person focusing on each member of the Barnes family in turn. Cass is obsessed with sad-girl poetry and her best friend Elaine, but self-destructive habits threaten her university career before it’s begun. PJ is better at making friends through online gaming than in real life because of his family’s plunging reputation, so concocts a plan to run away to Dublin. Imelda is flirting with Big Mike, who’s taking over the dealership, but holds out hope that Dickie’s wealthy father will bail them out. Dickie, under the influence of a weird handyman named Victor, has become fixated on eradicating grey squirrels and building a bunker to keep his family safe.
There are no speech marks throughout, and virtually no punctuation in Imelda’s sections. There are otherwise no clever tricks to distinguish the points-of-view, though. The voice is consistent. Murray doesn’t have to strain to sound like a teenage girl; he fully and convincingly inhabits each character (even some additional ones towards the end). I particularly liked the final “Age of Loneliness” section, which starts rotating between the perspectives more quickly, each one now in the second person. It all builds towards a truly thrilling yet inconclusive ending. I could imagine this as a TV miniseries for sure.
SPOILERS, if you’re worried about that sort of thing:
It was all the details I didn’t pick up from my pre-reading about The Bee Sting that made it so intricate and rewarding. Imelda’s awful upbringing in macho poverty and how it seemed that Rose, then Frank, might save her. The cruelty of Frank’s accidental death and the way that, for both Imelda and Dickie, being together seemed like the only way of getting over him, even if Imelda was marrying the ‘wrong’ brother. The recurrence of same-sex attraction for Dickie, then Cass. The irony of the bee sting that never was.
BUT. Yes, it’s too long, particularly Imelda’s central section. I had to start skimming to have any hope of making it through. Trim the whole thing by 200 pages and then we’re really talking. But I will certainly read Murray again, and most likely will revisit this book in the future to give it the attention it deserves. I read it from the library’s Bestsellers collection; the story of how I own a copy as of this week is a long one…
(Public library; free from the Booker Prize/Premier Comms)
I’ll be catching up on reviewing March releases in early April.
Happy Easter to those who celebrate!
20 Books of Summer, 18–20: Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, Sarah Hall, Meghan O’Rourke
Whew, it’s the final day of the challenge and I’ve managed to finish and write up a last batch of two novels and one nonfiction work: a magic realist tableau of love and death in Trinidad, a fateful romance set against the backdrop of the construction of an English dam in 1936, and a personal and cultural record of chronic illness and its treatment in contemporary America.
When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo (2022)
I was sent a copy as part of the McKitterick Prize shortlist. The setting of a cemetery, Fidelis in Port Angeles, Trinidad, had vaguely attracted me even before its nomination. Emmanuel Darwin has turned his back on his Rastafarian upbringing to cut off his dreadlocks and work as a gravedigger (any contact with the dead is anathema in the religion). Meanwhile, Yejide, who lives in the hills, is losing her mother, Petronella, and gaining a legacy she’s not sure she wants: the women of her family are caretakers of the souls of the dead, keeping them alive in exchange for protection. Like the corbeaux, dark counterparts of tropical parrots, they tread the border of life and death. As All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days draw closer, Darwin and Yejide together have to decide whether they will be swallowed by the graveyard or escape it. While this was atmospheric and had alluring elements, the speculative angle was not notably well realized and the particular form of patois – eschewing all possessives and most verb conjugations – drove me nuts. I skimmed this one. (Free from the Society of Authors) 
Haweswater by Sarah Hall (2002)
I bought this in Cumbria one year and started reading it in Cumbria the next. Once I got home, however, there was little impetus to keep going. Were it not for the temporary local interest, I likely would not have finished this debut novel, which lurches between dry and melodramatic. As it is, I had to skim to the end. Had it been my first taste of Sarah Hall’s work, it might have put me off trying her again.
The frame is historical: Haweswater was indeed dammed to provide water for the city of Manchester in 1936, flooding the village of Mardale. Hall focuses on the people of Mardale, specifically the Lightburn family, who have persisted with farming despite its particular challenges in this hilly landscape. When Jack Liggett comes out from the City on behalf of the waterworks, he meets with hostility, including from the Lightburns’ daughter, Janet, who negotiates for their tenancy to continue until the dam is actually built. Then, well, you know, Romeo and Juliet and pride and prejudice and all that, and they start an affair. Hall has always written forthrightly about sex, starting here.
There’s a climactic final 60 pages in which three major characters die, two in symbolic acts of suicide, but it was a little too much tragedy, too late, for me after the dull midsection. I was intrigued, however, that a plot point turns on golden eagles being in the valley, as Wild Fell, another of my Haweswater-set reads, opens with the presence of the ghost of England’s last golden eagle, who vanished in 2015. This related snippet shows how over-the-top Hall’s use of dialect is: “Golden eagles wud be mor’less gone, gone or illegal these days, like, notta funni bizniz t’be gittin’ mixed up in, eh? What kinda daft bugger d’yer take mi for?” It’s like Thomas Hardy rustics – hard to take seriously. (Anne-Marie Sanderson’s haunting song “Haweswater” is based on the novel.) (Secondhand – Clutterbooks, Sedbergh, 2022) 
The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke (2022)
Well before I was a devoted follower of the Barbellion Prize for books on disability and chronic illness, I was interested in these topics. For much of her forties and fifties, my mother struggled with fibromyalgia, one of a suite of illnesses misunderstood or even dismissed by the medical profession (as O’Rourke puts it, with a tongue-in-cheek nod to Jane Austen: “it is a truth universally acknowledged among the chronically ill that a young woman in possession of vague symptoms like fatigue and pain will be in search of a doctor who believes she is actually sick”). I hope this National Book Award nominee goes some way toward convincing skeptics that these are real conditions to be addressed by listening to patients and treating them holistically.
In 2012 the author became seriously ill and spent much of her thirties in a fog of pain, spending the equivalent of several days per month at doctors’ appointments and agreeing to ever more bizarre treatments in her desperation. Some of her issues were autoimmune and/or genetic: Hashimoto’s (thyroid), Ehlers-Danlos, POTS, endometriosis. She also dealt with infertility at the same time as she was trying to get well enough to contemplate having children. For her, the turning point was when she was diagnosed with Lyme disease and put on antibiotics. (Later she would travel to London to get fecal microbiota transplants to restore her microbiome.) Chronic Lyme is similar to long COVID, the true extent of which we’re only just beginning to understand; reading a list of the symptoms, I was tempted to remotely/retrospectively diagnose a few people I know with one or the other. It can be ever so slightly miserable reading about navigating all of these conditions, though nowhere near as miserable as it must have been for O’Rourke to live through them, of course.
I knew the author for her exquisite memoir of losing her mother to cancer, The Long Goodbye. Here the writing is more functional and journalistic, but I was still impressed by the attention she pays and the connections she draws; she’s also a poet, so she’s open to emotions and keen to capture them in words. In the face of the unexplained, she contends, chronically ill people are searching for meaning and narrative (restitution, chaos or quest, as Arthur Frank named the three options). She probes her own psyche: “had I become trapped in my identity as a sick person, someone afraid of living? If my mission in life had been reduced to being well at all costs, then the illness had won.” There’s a good balance of research, personal experience and general reflection in this one. (Passed along by Laura – thank you!) 
Related reads: Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick, It’s All in Your Head by Suzanne O’Sullivan, Waiting for Superman by Tracie White
And that’s a wrap! My summer reading was a little scattered and not as thematic as initially planned, but I stuck to my pledge to read only print books that I owned, and then cleared half of them from my shelves through reselling or donating to the Little Free Library. I’ll definitely call that a win.
My favourite from the 20 was a novel, Search by Michelle Huneven, then Making the Beds for the Dead by Gillian Clarke (poetry), followed by two chef’s memoirs, A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain and Dirt by Bill Buford, and Dorthe Nors’ nature/travel essays. The one DNF and couple of skims are unfortunate, but these things happen.
Next year I fancy a completely open challenge – just, again, getting through books from my shelves. (Maybe all hardbacks?)
Prize Updates: McKitterick Prize Winner and Wainwright Prize Longlists
It was my second year as a first-round manuscript judge for the McKitterick Prize; have a look at my rundown of the shortlist here.
The winner, Louise Kennedy, and runner-up, Liz Hyder, were announced on 29 June. (Nominee Aamina Ahmad won a different SoA Award that night, the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize for a novel focusing on the experience of travel away from home.) Other recipients included Travis Alabanza, Caroline Bird, Bonnie Garmus and Nicola Griffith. For more on all of this year’s SoA Award winners, see their website.
I’m a big fan of the Wainwright Prize for nature and conservation writing, and have been following it particularly closely since 2020, when I happened to read most of the nominees. In 2021 I also managed to read quite a lot from the longlists; 2022, the first year of an additional prize for children’s literature, saw me reading about a third of the total nominees.
This is the third year that I’ve been part of an “academy” of bloggers, booksellers, former judges and previously shortlisted authors asked to comment on a very long list of publisher submissions. I’m delighted that a few of my preferences made it through to the longlists.
My taste generally runs more to the narrative nature writing than the popular science or travel-based books. I find I’ve read just two from the Nature list (Bersweden and Huband) and one each from Conservation (Pavelle) and Children’s (Hargrave) so far.
The 2023 James Cropper Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing longlist:
- The Swimmer: The Wild Life of Roger Deakin, Patrick Barkham (Hamish Hamilton)
- The Flow: Rivers, Water and Wildness, Amy-Jane Beer (Bloomsbury)
- Where the Wildflowers Grow, Leif Bersweden (Hodder)
- Twelve Words for Moss, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett (Allen Lane)
- Cacophony of Bone, Kerri ní Dochartaigh (Canongate)
- Sea Bean, Sally Huband (Hutchinson)
- Ten Birds that Changed the World, Stephen Moss (Faber)
- A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast, Dorthe Nors, translated by Caroline Waight (Pushkin)
- The Golden Mole: And Other Living Treasure, Katherine Rundell, illustrated by Talya Baldwin (Faber)
- Belonging: Natural Histories of Place, Identity and Home, Amanda Thomson (Canongate)
- Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival, Alice Vincent (Canongate)
- Landlines, Raynor Winn (Penguin)
The 2023 James Cropper Wainwright Prize for Writing on Conservation longlist:
- Sarn Helen: A Journey Through Wales, Past, Present and Future, Tom Bullough, illustrated by Jackie Morris (Granta)
- Beastly: A New History of Animals and Us, Keggie Carew (Canongate)
- Rewilding the Sea: How to Save Our Oceans, Charles Clover (Ebury)
- Birdgirl, Mya-Rose Craig (Jonathan Cape)
- The Orchid Outlaw, Ben Jacob (John Murray)
- Elixir: In the Valley at the End of Time, Kapka Kassabova (Jonathan Cape)
- Rooted: How Regenerative Farming Can Change the World, Sarah Langford (Viking)
- Black Ops and Beaver Bombing: Adventures with Britain’s Wild Mammals, Fiona Mathews and Tim Kendall (Oneworld)
- Forget Me Not, Sophie Pavelle (Bloomsbury)
- Fen, Bog, and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and its Role in the Climate Crisis, Annie Proulx (Fourth Estate)
- The Lost Rainforests of Britain, Guy Shrubsole (HarperCollins)
- Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval, Gaia Vince (Allen Lane)
The 2023 James Cropper Wainwright Prize for Children’s Writing on Nature and Conservation longlist:
- The Earth Book, Hannah Alice (Nosy Crow)
- The Light in Everything, Katya Balen, illustrated by Sydney Smith (Bloomsbury)
- Billy Conker’s Nature-Spotting Adventure, Conor Busuttil (O’Brien)
- Protecting the Planet: The Season of Giraffes, Nicola Davies, illustrated by Emily Sutton (Walker)
- Blobfish, Olaf Falafel (Walker)
- A Friend to Nature, Laura Knowles, illustrated by Rebecca Gibbon (Welbeck)
- Spark, M G Leonard (Walker)
- A Wild Child’s Book of Birds, Dara McAnulty (Macmillan)
- Leila and the Blue Fox, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, illustrated by Tom de Freston (Hachette Children’s Group)
- The Zebra’s Great Escape, Katherine Rundell, illustrated by Sara Ogilvie (Bloomsbury)
- Archie’s Apple, Hannah Shuckburgh, illustrated by Octavia Mackenzie (Little Toller)
- Grandpa and the Kingfisher, Anna Wilson, illustrated by Sarah Massini (Nosy Crow)
It’s impressive that women writers are represented so well this year: 9/12 for Nature, 8/12 for Conservation, and 8/12 for Children’s. Amusingly, Katherine Rundell is on TWO of the lists. There are also, refreshingly, several BIPOC authors, and – I think for the first time ever – a work in translation (A Line in the World by Dorthe Nors, which I have as a set-aside proof copy and will get back into at once).
Here is where I have to admit that quite a number of the nominees, overall, are books I DNFed, authors whose work I’ve tried before and not enjoyed, or books I’ve been turned off of by the reviews. I’ll not mention these by name just now, and will leave any predictions for a future date when I’ve read a few more of the nominees. It seems that I’m most likely to catch up with the majority of the children’s longlist, if anything.
The shortlists will be announced on 10 August, and winners will be announced on 14 September at a 10th Anniversary live event held as part of the Kendal Mountain Festival in Cumbria (tickets available here).
See any nominees you’ve read? Who would you like to see shortlisted?
Introducing the 2023 McKitterick Prize Shortlist
For the second year in a row, I was a first-round judge for the McKitterick Prize (for a first novel by a writer over 40), helping to assess the unpublished manuscripts. Perhaps lockdowns gave people time to achieve a long-held goal of writing a novel, because submissions were up by 50%. None of the manuscripts made it through to the shortlist this year or last, but one day it could happen!
The Society of Authors kindly sent me a parcel with five of the shortlisted novels, and I picked up the remaining one from the library this week. Below are synopses from Goodreads and author bios from the SoA:
The Return of Faraz Ali by Aamina Ahmad (Sceptre): “Sent back to his birthplace—Lahore’s notorious red-light district—to hush up the murder of a girl, a man finds himself in an unexpected reckoning with his past. … Profoundly intimate and propulsive, The Return of Faraz Ali is a spellbindingly assured first novel that poses a timeless question: Whom do we choose to protect, and at what price?”
Aamina Ahmad was born and raised in London, where she worked for BBC Drama and other independent television companies as a script editor. Her play The Dishonoured was produced by Kali Theatre Company in 2016. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a recipient of a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writers Award. Her short fiction has appeared in journals including One Story, the Southern Review and Ecotone. She teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota.
When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo (Hamish Hamilton): “Yejide and Darwin will meet inside the gates of Fidelis, Port Angeles’s largest and oldest cemetery, where the dead lie uneasy in their graves and a reckoning with fate beckons them both. A masterwork of lush imagination and immersive lyricism, When We Were Birds is a spellbinding novel about inheritance, loss, and love’s seismic power to heal.”
Ayanna Lloyd Banwo is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago. She is a graduate of the University of the West Indies and holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she is now a Creative and Critical Writing PhD candidate. Her work has been published in Moko Magazine, Small Axe and PREE, among others, and shortlisted for the Small Axe Literary Competition and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. When We Were Birds, Ayanna’s first novel, was shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize and won the OCM Bocas Prize for Fiction. She is now working on her second novel. Ayanna lives with her husband in London.
The Gifts by Liz Hyder (Manilla Press): “October 1840. A young woman staggers alone through a forest in the English countryside as a huge pair of impossible wings rip themselves from her shoulders. In London, rumours of a “fallen angel” cause a frenzy across the city, and a surgeon desperate for fame and fortune finds himself in the grips of a dangerous obsession. … [A] spellbinding tale told through five different perspectives …, it explores science, nature and religion, enlightenment, the role of women in society and the dark danger of ambition.”
Liz Hyder has been making up stories for as long she can remember. She has a BA in drama from the University of Bristol and, in early 2018, won the Bridge Award/Moniack Mhor Emerging Writer Award. Bearmouth, her debut young adult novel, won a Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, the Branford Boase Award and was chosen as the Children’s Book of the Year by The Times. Originally from London, she now lives in South Shropshire. The Gifts is her debut adult novel.
Trespasses by Louise Kennedy (Bloomsbury Publishing): “Set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a shattering novel about a young woman caught between allegiance to community and a dangerous passion. … As tender as it is unflinching, Trespasses is a heart-pounding, heart-rending drama of thwarted love and irreconcilable loyalties, in a place what you come from seems to count more than what you do, or whom you cherish.”
Louise Kennedy grew up a few miles from Belfast. She is the author of the Women’s Prize-shortlisted novel Trespasses, and the acclaimed short story collection The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, and is the only woman to have been shortlisted twice for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award (2019 and 2020). Before starting her writing career, she spent nearly thirty years working as a chef. She lives in Sligo.
The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn (Fig Tree): “One blustery night in 1928, a whale washes up on the shores of the English Channel. By law, it belongs to the King, but twelve-year-old orphan Cristabel Seagrave has other plans. She and the rest of the household … build a theatre from the beast’s skeletal rib cage. … As Cristabel grows into a headstrong young woman, World War II rears its head.”
Joanna Quinn was born in London and grew up in the southwest of England, where her bestselling debut novel, The Whalebone Theatre, is set. Joanna has worked in journalism and the charity sector. She is also a short story writer, published by The White Review and Comma Press, among others. She lives in a village near the sea in Dorset.
Other Names for Love by Taymour Soomro (Harvill Secker): “A seductive coming-of-age story about queer desire, Other Names for Love is a charged, hypnotic debut novel about a boy’s life-changing summer in rural Pakistan: a story of fathers, sons, and the consequences of desire. … Decades later, Fahad is living abroad when he receives a call from his mother summoning him home. … [A] tale of masculinity, inheritance, and desire set against the backdrop of a country’s violent history, told with uncommon urgency and beauty.”
Taymour Soomro is the author of Other Names for Love and co-editor of Letters to a Writer of Colour. His writing has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times and elsewhere. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sozopol Fiction Seminars. He has degrees from Cambridge University and Stanford Law School and a PhD in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. He currently teaches on the MFA program at Bennington College.
Fellow judge Selma Dabbagh summarises the shortlist thus: “Family estates in rural Pakistan (Other Names for Love) and England (The Whalebone Theatre) fall into decline reflecting the hubris and short-sightedness of their owners[;] in The Return of Faraz Ali, it is the decaying grandeur of the courtesans of Lahore that is lovingly depicted. Whereas in both The Gifts and When We Were Birds, the otherworldly brings new possibilities to the tawdry and impoverished as mystical wings fly over the slums of Victorian London and the graveyards of Trinidad.”
I was already interested in reading a couple of these novels, and was pleased to discover a few new-to-me titles. As it’s also shortlisted for the Women’s Prize (which will be awarded on Wednesday), it seems to make sense to start with Trespasses, and I’m also particularly keen on The Gifts, which sounds like a great holiday read and right up my street, so I’m packing it for our trip to Scotland later this month. One or more of the others might end up on my 20 Books of Summer list. I’ll be sure to follow up with reviews of any I manage to read this summer.
The winner and runner-up will be announced at the SoA Awards ceremony in London on 29 June. I’ll be away at the time but will hope to watch part of the livestream. For more on all of the SoA Awards, see the press release on their website.
See any nominees you’ve read? Who would you like to see win?
Young Writer of the Year Award Shortlist: Larger than an Orange by Lucy Burns
Looking back, being on the 2017 shadow panel for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award was still one of the best things I’ve achieved in my time as a book blogger. Each year I eagerly look out for this award’s shortlist to see how many titles I’ve read and who I think the judges will choose as the winner. For a couple years the prize has had a higher cash fund thanks to sponsorship from the Charlotte Aitken Trust, and is now, like the McKitterick Prize that I’ve judged the past two years, administered by the Society of Authors.
This year’s four nominees include two novels and two nonfiction works: Oxblood by Tom Benn is said to be a “poignantly rendered exploration of domesticity and violence” and Maddie Mortimer’s Maps of our Spectacular Bodies, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize and was longlisted for the Booker Prize, is a “lyrical and captivating look at mortality, desire and forgiveness”; Lucy Burns’s debut memoir is an examination of abortion through the prism of her personal experience; and Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite (winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction) is a biography of John Donne.
I was intrigued by the premise (narration by a young woman – and her cancer) of the Mortimer when it was longlisted for the Booker so bought a sale copy with a Christmas voucher, but the style and over-400-page length has been defeating me. I might try again, but for a debut author’s experimental work I think 200 pages would have been sufficient. I’m not keen to try the Benn, but would gladly read the Rundell from the library another time. The final book is one I requested as a review copy.
Larger Than an Orange by Lucy Burns (2021)
I’ve only read one other memoir of an abortion (as opposed to a memoir in which an abortion is simply one event of many), Happening by Annie Ernaux, so it was perhaps inevitable for me to get similar vibes from the two works. Both are fragmentary, spare; matter of fact in tone to avoid melodramatic extremes of emotion. The difference, of course, is that in the 1960s abortion was illegal in France and so ending a pregnancy required clandestine action. However, even in 2017, when the then 26-year-old Burns had a medical abortion in England, where it had been legal for 50 years, she found that the process was invasive and officious. She presents the experience as infantilizing – not trusting the patient, and lacking in compassion. And although it was the only practical choice for her at the time and she remains firmly committed to women’s right to an abortion, it sparked feelings of guilt, shame and depression that lingered and affected her work and personal life. At counselling appointments she expressed disgust at herself, and she became obsessed with looking up American pro-life propaganda and testimonials from former abortion clinic workers online.
The book is, collage-like, assembled from pieces – sometimes as little as one paragraph or one line to a page – of dated autobiographical material, going back and forth between the summer of the abortion and the few-year aftermath as she suffers with irregular bleeding, chooses a new contraceptive method and has a short-term relationship; transcripts of radio debates; alphabetical lists of predicted search terms and so on. She even requests her medical records, including sections from it plus ultrasound images, and marks her baby’s would-be birthday.
I could imagine this working very well as a play for voices, especially because Burns is in the habit of counting each person she tells about the abortion and referring to them by their number until, at fifty-something, she gives up. Friends, receptionists, the people at work who adjudicate her petition to be granted two weeks’ leave: there are those she tells willingly and those she feels duty-bound to inform to explain her health or behaviour. Some remain a part of her life and others, awkward or judgemental, fade out of it.
This is a powerful read I can’t say I necessarily enjoyed, but did admire for its uncompromising clarity and honesty, and its willingness to probe both sides of ethical issues in a way that ‘good feminists’ might think they cannot.
With thanks to FMcM Associates and Chatto & Windus for the free copy for review.
Tomorrow we’ll hear the Young Writer of the Year results. My feeling is that Katherine Rundell, though already a prize winner for this book and an established author due to her children’s oeuvre, will win for Super-Infinite.
Have you read anything from this year’s shortlist?
November Releases: Dickens and Prince, Bratwurst Haven, Routes
Here are a few November books I read early for review, or that didn’t quite fit into the month’s other challenges – although, come to think of it, all are technically of novella length! (Come back tomorrow for a roundup of all the random novellas I’ve finished late in the month, and on Thursday for a retrospective of this year’s Novellas in November.)
Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius by Nick Hornby
This exuberant essay, a paean to energy and imagination, draws unexpected connections between two of Hornby’s heroes. Both came from poverty, skyrocketed to fame in their twenties, were astoundingly prolific/workaholic artists, valued performance perhaps more highly than finished products, felt the industry was cheating them, had a weakness for women and died at a similar age. Biographical research shares the page with shrewd cultural commentary and glimpses of Hornby’s writing life. Whether a fan of both subjects, either or none, you’ll surely admire these geniuses’ vitality, too. (Full review forthcoming in the December 30th issue of Shelf Awareness.) 
Bratwurst Haven: Stories by Rachel King
In a dozen gritty linked short stories, lovable, flawed characters navigate aging, parenthood, and relationships. Set in Colorado in the recent past, the book depicts a gentrifying area where blue-collar workers struggle to afford childcare and health insurance. As Gus, their boss at St. Anthony Sausage, withdraws their benefits and breaks in response to a recession, it’s unclear whether the business will survive. Each story covers the perspective of a different employee. The connections between tales are subtle. Overall, an endearing composite portrait of a working-class community in transition. (See my full review for Foreword.)
Routes by Rhiya Pau
Pau’s ancestors were part of the South Asian diaspora in East Africa, and later settled in the UK. Her debut, which won one of this year’s Eric Gregory Awards (from the Society of Authors, for a collection by a British poet under the age of 30), reflects on that stew of cultures and languages. Colours and food make up the lush metaphorical palette.
When I was small, I spoke two languages.
At school: proper English, pruned and prim,
tip of the tongue taps roof of the mouth,
delicate lips, like lace frilling rims of my white
cotton socks. At home, a heady brew:
Gujarati Hindi Swahili
swim in my mouth, tie-dye my tongue
with words like bandhani.
Alongside loads of alliteration (my most adored poetic technique)—
My goddess is a mother in marigold garland
—there are delightfully unexpected turns of phrase, almost synaesthetic in their blending of the senses:
right as I worry I have forgotten the scent
of grief, I catch the first blossom of the season
and we are back circling the Spring.
~
I am a chandelier of possibility.
Besides family history and Hindu theology, current events and politics are sources of inspiration. For instance, “We Gotta Talk About S/kincare” explores the ironies and nuances of attitudes towards Black and Brown public figures, e.g., lauding Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, but former UK Home Secretary Priti Patel? “our forever – guest of honour / would deport her own mother – if she could.” I also loved the playfulness with structure: “Ode to Corelle” employs a typically solemn form for a celebration of crockery, while the yoga-themed “Salutation” snakes across two pages like a curving spine. This reminded me of poetry I’ve enjoyed by other young Asian women: Romalyn Ante, Cynthia Miller, Nina Mingya Powles and Jenny Xie. A fantastic first book.
With thanks to Arachne Press for the proof copy for review.
Any more November releases you can recommend?
Society of Authors Awards Ceremony & 2022 McKitterick Prize
The Society of Authors, the UK trade union for writers, awards multiple grants and prizes. As I’ve mentioned in a couple of previous posts, I was one of the manuscript judges for its 2022 McKitterick Prize, awarded to a debut novelist aged 40+.
Last night I watched part of the livestream for the SoA Awards ceremony, held at Southwark Cathedral. I had to take the above screenshot! SoA Chair Joanne Harris and keynote speaker Lemn Sissay handed out the prizes to the winners and runners-up. (The full list is available here; I’m particularly delighted that Will McPhail’s In, the first graphic novel nominated for an SoA award, won the £10,000 Betty Trask Prize.)
The McKitterick Prize winner was:
A book I clearly need to source at once!
And the runner-up was:
(A controversial novel I’m not so sure I see myself reading.)
Wishing an enjoyable long Jubilee weekend to those in the UK who plan to celebrate. Down with the monarchy, is the general vibe in my household, but we’ll have scones and meet some new neighbours at today’s street party (our first of two) anyway.
McKitterick Prize Shortlist (and Other Society of Authors Awards)
As I announced back in November, I was one of the judges for the 2022 McKitterick Prize. This is one of several prizes administered by the Society of Authors, the UK trade union for writers, which awards various grants and prizes.
The McKitterick Prize has, since 1990, been awarded to a debut novelist aged 40 or over. It’s unique in that it considers unpublished manuscripts as well as published novels – Tom McKitterick, who endowed the Prize, was a former editor of Political Quarterly and had an unpublished novel at the time of his death.
My particular role in the process was helping to assess the unpublished manuscripts and whittling them down to a longlist, which then joined the traditionally published novels for overall judging. I can’t say too much about this process or the particular narratives that I read due to the judges’ nondisclosure agreement, but I’ll make a few general observations.
Almost all of the entries were capably written and would have done fine as self-published novels, but I was looking for a touch of greatness – something that could compete, as is, with published work. For the most part, it was clear which manuscripts were at a different level. In terms of serendipitous moments, I noted multiple “meet the parents” scenes and mentions of moss or witches. Switching between 2–4 time periods was a recurring feature. There were lots of thrillers and dystopian setups, too.
The shortlist was announced this morning. None of the manuscripts made it through, but I’m delighted to see Under the Blue on there. I’ve heard a lot about the Taddeo and Yoder, both of which seem to be divisive. The Mohammed was already on my radar, I’m interested in the Bennett, and the Annand is new to me but I’ll investigate further. Judge Anietie Isong says, “These are deeply engaging works that swell with vitality.”
I was also interested to note the shortlists for the
- Betty Trask Award for a first novel by a writer under 35: it overlaps with the latest Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award shortlist on two authors, Nelson and Nolan. I’ve also read the Brown. But I’m rooting for Will McPhail’s In, the first graphic novel to be shortlisted for an SoA award.
- Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize, new this year, for a novel focusing on the experience of travel away from home (in memory of Malcolm Lowry and endowed by Gordon Bowker, his biographer): I’ve read Asylum Road and I think I have Diving for Pearls from NetGalley. I’ve read a nonfiction work by McWatt and would be interested in trying her fiction.
- Paul Torday Memorial Prize, awarded to a first novel by a writer over 60: I’ve only heard of one nominee, The Day I Fell Off My Island by Yvonne Bailey-Smith – that’s because she’s Zadie Smith’s mum.
Winners and runners-up will be announced at the SoA Awards ceremony, to be held at Southwark Cathedral on June 1st – I’ll be watching the livestream.
See any nominees you’ve read? Who would you like to see win?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 