“It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.”
“When I try to imagine the addresses of the houses and apartments I lived in before my grandparents kidnapped me, I can’t remember anything.”
“How rich and diverse, how complex and non-linear the history of all women is.”
“All that matters is that you are making something you love, to the best of your ability, here and now.”
Draw-along with Kazvare, author of Stay Woke, Kids! Download the image for printing here.
J.R. Thorp, author of Learwife, reveals why she chose to name her debut novel after the wife of Shakespeare’s famous King Lear.
‘People have been arguing over hip-hop ever since it first emerged, in the Bronx, New York, in the 1970s. It was soon the most controversial genre in the country – a distinction that has not, somehow, been erased by time or by popularity. As the genre became successful, then mainstream, then finally dominant, it never became unobjectionable. Over the decades, hip-hop has retained a singular connection to poor Black neighbourhoods across the US – and, for that matter, poor and not-necessarily-Black neighbourhoods around the world. This connection accounts for some of the demands placed upon the music: many listeners have felt that the genre ought to be politically aware, or explicitly revolutionary’
Kelefa Sanneh
The Guardian
Salena Godden, author of Mrs Death Misses Death, reads an extract from Mrs Death’s story of The Red Tower at the Durham Book Festival.
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
‘It is a novel, and I set that out very early… I new as someone in a wheelchair with a similar background to the main character I knew it’d always be conflated. So I call it kind of a land grab - I made the reader do the work, and kind of understand that to get to the book I wanted I had to y’know look at some very personal and intimite things in my life. And I couldn’t deny that the main character and I do share - he comes from me, and I didn’t want to have that degree of plausible denability that some other fiction writers utilise. I wanted to kind of admit that.’
Jarred McGinnis
Monocle Meet the Writers