Ruth Ozeki
Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the award-winning author of four novels: My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, A Tale for the Time Being – which was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize and translated into 28 languages – and The Book of Form and Emptiness, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022. Her nonfiction work includes the documentary film Halving the Bones and the short memoir, Timecode of a Face. She is affiliated with the Everyday Zen Foundation and lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she taught creative writing at Smith College and is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor Emerita of Humanities.
ruthozeki.com
The Book of Form and Emptiness
‘What she is best at conveying, though, is the tidal flood of human life and the absurd, unwieldy scurf of manufactured objects that has accompanied it through the Anthropocene. You hang on to your things in case you’re swept away by the water and become like a thing yourself. What can be relinquished and what can’t?
At base, this is a simple story about the links between poverty, mental health and loss. It’s often heartbreaking, but we would be wrong to interpret Annabelle and Benny’s struggles as a descent. Ozeki is carefully celebrating difference, not patronising dysfunction. Out of their fractured relations, she makes something so satisfying that it gave me the sense of being addressed not by an author but by a world’
M. John Harrison
Guardian
Presenting: THE BOOK OF FORM & EMPTINESS The unforgettable new novel from @TheBookerPrizes-shortlisted author of A Tale For the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki (@ozekiland). Pre-order via your local bookshop, or online at linktr.ee/thebook