Photo by Elina Simone.

Our latest instalment of podcasts for our Best of Young British Novelist features Adam Thirlwell. Thirlwell is the author of the novels Politics and The Escape, the novella Kapow!, and a project with international novels that includes an essay-book, Miss Herbert and a compendium of translations edited for McSweeney’s. He was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists back in 2003. Here she spoke to Granta’s Yuka Igarashi about sex, history, translation, using tempo in novels and how his writing has evolved over the past decade.

In our latest installment of podcasts featuring our Best of Young British Novelists, we speak to Sarah Hall. Hall was born in Cumbria and lives in Norwich. She is the multiple-prize-winning author of four novels: Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo, The Carhullan Army (published in the US as Daughters of the North) and How to Paint a Dead Man; a collection of short stories, The Beautiful Indifference, original radio dramas and poetry. Here she spoke to Granta’s Saskia Vogel about wolves, tattoos and the wilds of Cumbria.

Photo by Richard Thwaites.

Andrew O’Hagan was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003 and since then has gone on to publish several novels, including Be Near Me (2006), which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction and The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (2010), which is told in the voice of a Scottish Maltese poodle, Maf, the name of a real dog given to Monroe by Frank Sinatra. Here he spoke to Granta’s Patrick Ryan about his book The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America (recently published in the US by Mariner and by Faber and Faber in the UK) and the many subjects it touches on, from the corrosive impact of Thatcherism on the fabric of society, to how the Beatles captured the Cold War in symphonic form, to playground politics and who he’d most like to share a Glasgow Sludge Boat with.

PR: ‘On Begging’ recounts your going undercover to investigate life as a panhandler in London. Can you tell us a little about your time spent on the streets, and the biggest surprise that awaited you?

AOH: It was the 1990s. We’d had over a dozen years of Tory rule in Britain and a kind of spite had entered the culture, spite about poor people. We are a welfare state, but something happened in the eighties – money happened, and then it happened even more in the nineties – and a great many of the people who weren’t We’d had over a dozen years of Tory rule in Britain and a kind of spite had entered the culture, spite about poor people. in the frame for doing well economically just dropped out altogether. It was like the 1930s. The poor became sort of hated and the least capable, the sick ones, the mad ones, were decanted onto the streets by strapped local welfare providers. So I moved among these people for a time and the surprise was really their resignation. They behaved as if this was how society now worked. They saw themselves as by-products of a system that couldn’t enrich everybody. And there was no politics to help them. There really wasn’t: Tony Blair was in some senses worse than Thatcher.

Is this ‘gonzo journalism’, or employing a disguise for the sake of getting the story? I’m curious, also, about whether or not anyone (passerby or fellow-panhandler) ever caught on to what you were doing – if the ‘fourth wall’ was ever perforated.

I was so young, and, you know, the thing about being twenty-four is that you needn’t make much effort to look like a hobo. And you’re closer to the ground somehow at that age, especially if you grew up in a world where people didn’t have any money. I drank in a certain way then and I found that I just kind of blended in under Waterloo Bridge. My main objective was to see if the Daily Mail’s contention that these homeless people were making £80,000 a year begging was true. And of course it wasn’t true. Those people were dying out there.

In the essay ‘After Hurricane Katrina’ you’re more ghosted, almost invisible, as you squeeze into a pickup truck with a pair of rednecks on their way to help storm victims in New Orleans. The essay reads like a short story packed with rich characters and vivid dialogue. Surely you had to write yourself out of that one. I kept imagining Sam and Terry’s reactions to you amidst their rolling commentary on the surroundings.

I did have to write myself out, yes, and I used the best examples to teach me how to do that. Truman Capote is nowhere in In Cold Blood, except, of course, that his mind is everywhere. My editors at the time wanted me to be in the story; it was clear the story would have been made more bearable to them if I was there, explaining things. But there are times, as a writer, when it is more important to create something that causes the reader to search for the explanations in themselves. That’s a sort of moral decision and reporters have to make it, now and then, just as novelists or playwrights do. By that point in my career, ten years on from ‘On Begging’, I’d come to feel that a lot of journalism was in danger of becoming ‘celebrity writing’, in the sense that the writer and his conscience could become the story. But the Katrina story needed to witness something bigger than my own liberal outrage. So I made that decision. To some people, even now, I was somehow letting Sam and Terry get away with something by not admonishing them in print.

You write about America’s appetite for pop icons with a precision and a wonderfully dry sense of humor I find unmatched in contemporary journalism. There are pieces in The Atlantic Ocean about Marilyn Monroe (and our obsession with her), Andy Warhol (and his obsession with celebrity), Lee Harvey Oswald (and the JFK conspiracy theorists who obsess over how many triggers were pulled in Dealey Plaza). You’ve also written an utterly charming and very literary (as in, not cute) novel about Marilyn Monroe, told from the point of view of the dog Frank Sinatra gave to her. Do you share the pop icon appetite, or is it more a matter of having your gaze drawn to a road accident and finding yourself unable to look away?

I grew up with George Orwell and Don DeLillo, two writers fascinated, we might say, by the ethics of populism. There’s a certain aura around collective belief and fandom – whether you’re talking about boys’ magazines or mass sporting events or conspiracy theories – that constitutes a whole new subject for people living, as we do, in the era There are times, as a writer, when it is more important to create something that causes the reader to search for the explanations in themselves. of celebrity. What we’re talking about is a wholesale change in what reality means and a new predicament for people who care about human values. Each of my books has been propelled by a question about the relationship between idealism and reality. My work has mainly been domestic, in the sense that it wants to see the heart of the family and the heart of the individual, but the way society organizes and exploits belief is always pressing in on things for me. As a writer, you can set out to rediscover the humanity in things, give some of it back, and that, for instance, was what I wanted to do with Marilyn. Every book and every film seemed to take her away from herself, and I liked the notion, the technical notion, that a dog might restate her humanness. Plus: you’ve got to hold onto the hope of writing something delightful.

The essay ‘England and the Beatles’ is as much about the phenomenon of the Beatles coming to America as it is about the nation that produced them. How do you think the Beatles managed to reach across an ocean – and across generations – and impress everyone, it seems, but George W. Bush? And can you elaborate on your love for The White Album and your claim that the Beatles, as a group, ‘truly inhabited their own ambivalence’?

That’s a lot of questions. But they are potent questions for people born in the 20th century, potent, perhaps, in the same way that 19th century people who liked novels might have been excited about the Reform Bill or the birth of the railway. We – our ancestors and us – share an instinct for developments that change the shape of our lives and reveal something new about our minds. So the global success of this quartet of Scouse lads is one of the things that makes our world. You can see it happening during that big concert of theirs in Shea Stadium: you can’t hear the music, they are playing really badly, but it is a new world. And why? Because the people are really really screaming. And then you realize that The Beatles are among the cold war anthem-makers: they reveal the sound of America echoing back at itself across the Atlantic. They animate some new aspect of common desire. The White Album is the best album because it makes a kind of sublime symphony of all that culture and all those politics. And I doubt if they realized it. John Lennon might’ve, I suppose.

In ‘Good Fibs’, you call Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood ‘a moral artifact’ and ‘a work of beautiful invention’. That might sound like high praise if you hadn’t, just one page earlier, said that Capote ‘left behind the truth when he stopped writing his novels’. Do you think Capote damaged the future of non-fiction – even temporarily – in the way he went about writing his masterpiece, or the books that followed it?

Oh, I don’t know. The truth. It’s been so corrupted by news organizations that I find it hard to get excited about the possibility that Truman made a few things up. He certainly penetrated the culture he was writing about, and that’s all I care about. The point I was trying to make is that fiction harbours its own veracity, whereas reporting, well, it’s reliant on something out there in the world that is not clearly truthful. Of course good reporters get to the truth, but they have to climb over a whole lot of bullshit to get there, and not all of them make it.

‘Racing Against Reality’ examines how everyone’s having instant visual access to world events changes the way we write about those events immediately after the fact. This seems to be truer for journalists than for novelists. You say of 9/11, for example: ‘Actuality showed its own naked art that day.’ Can you tell us about what might be called ‘the failure of metaphors’ when journalists attempt to describe footage of events we’ve all recently witnessed?

Let’s stick with your example, 9/11. There wasn’t a novelist on the planet, and not a reporter either, who could compete with the sheer spectacular horror of what we saw. Every writer who tried to make words illuminate it only made it duller. And I’m talking good writers. For John Updike, Tower One coming down was like an elevator descending at speed. (No it wasn’t.) For Martin Amis, if I remember correctly, the entry of the second plane was like someone posting an envelope. (No it wasn’t.) We saw for ourselves exactly what it was like, and it was an event beyond the power of current language to describe it. There are many events in the world like that, but we don’t see them, and if we did, our language would fail us in the same way. The journalists were stymied, too. There wasn’t an exclusive they could get that could match the 911 calls that were coming from inside the towers. And they were public. It was a sobering day indeed for the power of the word.

How is a journalist to compensate, in such a situation? By avoiding metaphors altogether? By stripping language down to its bare bones?

It was a day for the essayists. And not enough of them were on duty that year to enrich our petrification. There was a time, just to stick with New York itself, when an entire generation of essayists were available, brilliant and deeply connected to the relationship between culture and politics. If those towers had been brought down in, say, 1956, can you imagine the difference in the writing about it? I’m talking essayists burrowing down into the psychic basement of the thing, not relenting until the fears, the complicities, the truths, the lessons, had been exposed. But in 1956 you had that culture of the essay and you had, in their prime, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, William Styron, Elizabeth Hardwick, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Saul Bellow and a dozen more. It wasn’t just about having the personnel, though, those essayists had the reach, they had the balls, and – most important of all – they had the audience.

The earliest-written piece in The Atlantic Ocean, ‘The Killing of James Bulger’, springboards from the ghastly murder of a two-year-old boy in Liverpool to the nature of cruelty. Bullying has come to the forefront in the American The thing about being twenty-four is that you needn’t make much effort to look like a hobo. press over the past few years, as the number of teen suicides has risen (and as social media has made the backtracking of such cases available to the public). Given the experiences you recount from your own childhood, do you think the potential for bullying and outright cruelty exists in us all from a young age? Should we view a case like James Bulger’s as something much more disturbing than an aberration?

Well, I always thought so. It’s still a great shibboleth: the innocence of childhood. But I don’t think children are innocent: I think they are narcissistic and quite often cruel. Go to any playground and you’ll see what I mean. That essay I wrote was pretty simple – it was the reaction that was complex. As societies, we simply can’t bear the notion that children are capable of terrible things. It offends our sense of the natural order of life. But most adults are less likely to hit you than a child is, if left to his or her own little devices. Most children grow out of it, of course, but that’s just it, they have an ‘it’ to grow out of.

An afternoon on the Glasgow Sludge Boat: Bagged corned beef sandwiches, Tunnock’s teacakes, a view of Greenock off the bow. You can have any three people mentioned in The Atlantic Ocean with you; who would they be?

O jeez, that’s hard. OK, I’ll have Norman Mailer because I once promised him I’d show him Scotland. I’ll have Marilyn, because Norman always wanted to meet her, and I think, moreover, she would’ve taken heart from those old ladies of Clydebank, who overcame every kind of adversity in order to be the women they were. And I’d have George Baroli, the old, drunk, homeless guy who sat beside me on the park bench in ‘On Begging’, the first long-form piece I ever wrote. George must be dead now, and so are the others, but I feel sure he would enjoy our day out on the ship of ghosts. He would like the Clyde in the middle of the afternoon and that great sense of a community that really cares for him. ■

The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America by Andrew O’Hagan is published by Mariner in the US and Faber and Faber in the UK.

Continuing a series of podcasts featuring our Best of Young British Novelists, today we bring you an interview with Xiaolu Guo. Guo studied at the Beijing Film Academy and received her MA from the National Film School in London. She has published seven novels in both English and Chinese. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her other novels include UFO in Her Eyes and 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth. She directed the award-winning films, She, a Chinese and Once Upon a Time Proletarian. 'Interim Zone', in the issue, is an excerpt from I Am China, her new novel forthcoming from Chatto & Windus in the UK. Here she spoke to deputy editor Ellah Allfrey about her experience of growing up in rural China, her move to writing in English and becoming an East Ender.

Image by FotoCavallo.

It was the summer of 2004 and my years of living as a rentier were over. I was returning to London from Brussels, would be displacing my own tenants in Islington, and needed a new source of income. I wondered whether it might be possible to make a living by betting on horses. It wasn’t the first time the idea had occurred to me. At an earlier stage of my life, facing a similar financial situation, I had tried to develop a ‘system’ for doing so, and one afternoon, that summer in Brussels, I dusted it down. It’s hard to say now quite how seriously I took the idea at the time. It’s possible that I didn’t take it seriously at all, that I thought the tinkering with spreadsheets it involved would be the fad of a few days. In fact I spent the next two years trying to make it work.

My old idea was based on the Martingale system – sometimes used by unwise roulette players – which involves doubling your stake every time you lose so that when eventually you win, you recoup all your losses plus a profit equal to your original stake. Its obvious flaw is that the exponential nature of the maths means that you are soon placing very large bets. Say your initial stake is as small as £10. After only seven losses you will be placing a bet of £1,280. If you lose again – and of course your chances of winning at any point are not improved by the fact that you have already lost many times – the next bet will be £2,560. Lose again and it will be £5,120. A sequence of ten losers will wipe out a £20,000 starting bank – if you can even find a bookie to take your final £10,240 bet – and all in an attempt to win a single tenner. It is not a practical way of making money.

What I set myself to do, therefore, was somehow to adapt the Martingale system to make it more robust against improbably long sequences of losses. Any Martingale system is likely to tick over happily for quite a long time before it hits the statistical My old idea was based on the Martingale system – sometimes used by unwise roulette players – which involves doubling your stake every time you lose freak that wipes it out. This illusion of effective operation is compelling; it makes the problem – the brute mathematics of the inevitable iceberg – seem like a flaw that can somehow be fine-tuned away. I spent a lot of time, in the late summer of 2004, trying to do just that. Then, as with so many things, I found that someone else had already done it, a man by the name of Barry Hughes, who had developed something he called the Retirement Staking Plan. What his plan did was divide a large loss into a number of smaller ones and then retrieve them one by one. This kept the stakes within manageable limits, and the Retirement Staking Plan was able, said Barry, to survive sequences of up to forty-eight losses.

I tested it using the selections of a former jockey who had an online tipping service to which I had subscribed, and it seemed to work. That is, it made money over time and survived – sometimes only just – long sequences of losses. Excited by its success, to penny stakes at first, I started to operate it live. (I should say at this point that I had absolutely no interest in horse racing per se whatsoever. The names of the horses that the tipster put up meant nothing to me.)

Barry’s staking plan and the jockey’s selections produced money smoothly throughout the autumn. I say smoothly – no doubt there were stressful moments, especially as I stepped up the stakes. Fairly soon I was putting on individual bets of several hundred pounds. With somewhere between ten and twenty bets a week, a nasty sequence of losses might be put together in only a few days, and even with Barry’s supposedly fail-safe plan there was a sense, especially at first, of never being far from snowballing disaster. Still, there had been sequences that would have sunk a simple Martingale system that Barry’s maths had successfully negotiated. Money was being won – and money won, so the saying has it, is twice as sweet as money earned. There was one day that sticks in my mind, when I won over £5,000 – I was in London at the time and I remember emerging from the Tate Gallery late in the afternoon and wandering into the nearest William Hill to find that every single one of the tipster’s four or five selections that day had gone in. That was just before Christmas.

I had in fact won upwards of £15,000 since September, and had taken to travelling first class on the Eurostar when I went back and forth between Brussels and London, preparing for the relocation that was due to happen at the end of January. I fully believed that I had solved my income problem, and spent a fair amount of time shopping for expensive wine. What happened next was heartbreaking. It wasn’t like a hydrogen bomb – the exponential catastrophe of the typical Martingale system. Barry’s plan ensured that it was slower and less dramatic than that, and perhaps more painful as a result. For most of the two winless weeks, I was staking £500 on each selection and losing more than £1000 a day. There was something unreal about it. ‘Could it really be,’ I must have asked myself, on more than one evening, ‘that I lost two and a half grand on the horses today?’ Only a few months before the scenario would have seemed outlandish, the stuff of melodrama or morality tale. When the losses reached the point where they amounted to more or less exactly what I had won since September, I stopped. I told myself that if I had not won, I had not lost either. I had come out even. Unfortunately that wasn’t the end of it.

I still had an income problem and by now had moved back to London. As it happened, I had sold my flat and was living in expensive rented accommodation – I had signed the lease in December when I thought I would be making five grand a month tax-free. I suppose it was the months of plenty before the catastrophe that persuaded me, even then, that it must be possible to make a living from betting on horses – that, and a stubbornness that made it hard for me to admit that any task I had set myself was impossible; and no doubt an aversion to plain honest work as well. The trauma of those terrible weeks in January did not, in any case, dissuade me from trying again.

I blamed the ex-jockey whose tips I had been using. He was clearly rubbish. No amount of lipstick, in the form of Barry’s staking plan, would prettify that particular pig. Having said that, I had become sceptical about the ability of any sort of staking plan to deliver reliable returns in the absence of sound selections. Selection – and this should perhaps have been obvious from the start – was the important thing. I still knew next to nothing about horse racing myself, so clearly it wouldn’t be me making those selections. I had, however, started to research the various tipsters who sold their information on the internet, and the one that intrigued me was Henry Rix. He had been in business for years and his service had a serious, professional aura. It promised only a few tips a week – the website featured a lecture on the importance of discipline. It was also reassuringly expensive – about £1500 for a year’s subscription.

Now I wasn’t about to pay that myself, no matter how persuasive a website he might have, and it’s possible that the whole thing would have ended then, were it not for my discovery of Goldline. Goldline was a so-called relay service – it would pass on the tips of the likes of Henry Rix for a much lower annual fee. When I say much lower, I mean maybe £100, rather than £1500. I can’t remember the exact figure, but whatever it was, I was prepared to pay it for access to Rix’s selections, and I immediately started to back them to £100 a point.

The important thing enabling this development was that I was already in the habit of betting hundreds of pounds at a time on a single horse. That had, since the previous autumn, become normal for me. It was something I was able to do with perilous equanimity. Goldline also relayed various other services. In addition to Henry Rix, I shelled out for a subscription to Race-Call, which came highly recommended by Dave at Goldline, and started backing their selections in late January. April saw the addition of the Sports Betting Hotline, which supplied tips on various sporting events. Finally, in June I subscribed to Golf Insider, about which Dave had been consistently raving, and started to bet on the golf too.

When I look at the spreadsheets now, that year seems like a sort of heroic age of heavy hitting. There was certainly a heroic scale to the whole thing. In late May, I won £2,400 when a horse called Celtic Mill won at Sandown. I won £2,575 when Pastoral Pursuits took the July Cup at Newmarket. Later in the same month, I won several thousand pounds when Tiger Woods won the Open at St Andrews. The extraordinary thing is, I have no memory of any of these wins. What, I wonder now, must the texture of my life have been like then, that winning those sort of sums failed to leave even the slightest mark on my memory? The spreadsheets tell of shuddering losses too, of course – over five thousand pounds lost in a few short weeks in June, for instance. Overall, though, I was making a profit. It steadily increased through the spring and early summer, took that knock in June, and then started upward again in July and August.

Although I remember nothing about the flat racing season, which started in the spring – not even the major wins and losses – I do remember bits and pieces of the jumps season, which ended in April. I remember the death of Best Mate, the multiple Gold Cup winner – he collapsed and died of a heart I do love the way it takes place on truncated afternoons at unglamorous spots in Somerset and Northumberland and the Welsh borders. attack at Exeter racecourse in front of a stand full of people, a shocking incident. (That evening in the pub I told a friend that Best Mate had died that day – she thought I meant my best mate and reacted with an all-out horror that made me believe, for a moment, she was a major aficionado of the turf.) I remember the race in which Kauto Star, still unknown and having only his second run in this country, fell at the second last fence, also at Exeter as it happens, when leading. He was then remounted by Ruby Walsh and, like something out of an equine Chariots of Fire, only just failed to win the race anyway. I remember the 2005 Cheltenham Festival – the first time I had taken any interest in the event, or even been aware of it. I also remember the Grand National meeting at Aintree in April, but nothing after that, though the tipsters continued to make money through the summer.

Then, in September, they started to lose. Hull’s failure to beat Bradford, even at +18 on the handicap, in a rugby league match on which I had wagered £800, was the first sign that something was amiss. After that nothing seemed to go right. At the end of September I tried shuffling my tipsters – dropping some, introducing new ones. It didn’t work. A few significant wins in early October were enough to make me hope that the situation might be saved but November was disastrous, and by mid-December I was again facing the decision I had faced eleven months earlier – I had lost all my winnings, and had to make up my mind whether to continue, or not.

I did not continue – not then. The following year, though, I had another try, using a slightly different line-up of tipsters, and applying various statistical ‘filters’ to their selections. This time things went worse than the previous two efforts, in that rather than winning a load of money and then losing it, I just lost a load of money. Maybe five grand. I needed that. It was what I needed to persuade me to stop.

And what was left then, after two years of winning and losing hundreds, quite often thousands, of pounds a week? An affection for horse racing – for the jumps anyway, the ‘winter game’. I do love the way it takes place on truncated afternoons at unglamorous spots in Somerset and Northumberland and the Welsh borders. The mud-flecked aesthetic of it, the way it is embedded in the English landscape. I think of the sheep on the hills around Sedgefield. The shadows of leafless trees, the wind-buffeted daffodils at Plumpton on a sunny February afternoon. I prefer the so-called ‘gaff’ tracks like Plumpton, hidden away in the Sussex countryside, to the metropolitan parkland courses with their escalators and hospitality suites like airport lounges. This is a sport of farmers. I like the way the season ends in spring, like a fertility rite, as the land comes to life. ■

Continuing a series of podcasts featuring our Best of Young British Novelists, today we bring you an interview with David Szalay. Szalay was born in Canada; his family moved to the UK soon after, and he has lived here ever since. He has published three novels: London and the South-East, The Innocent and Spring. He is currently working on a number of new projects –‘Europa’, which appears in the issue, is an excerpt from one of these. He spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about how spending time in Hungary paradoxically makes it easier to write about London, his years trying to live off betting on horses and how memory informs his work.

For more about the author, including critical perspectives and in-depth biographies, visit the British Council’s web pages on David Szalay.

We continue an online series of former Best of Young Novelists introducing writers from the fourth edition, with Jeffrey Eugenides (1996) on Adam Thirlwell.

This is the second time Adam Thirlwell has been included in a Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists (under forty) but it won’t be the last. After publishing his first book at the age of three, (Mr) Thirlwell (then known as ‘Foo’ for a noise he liked to make) has continued his steady ascent in the literary world. Now, he gives us ‘Slow Motion’, a work notable not only for its linguistic brilliance but for the fact that the author wrote it in green crayon on the wall of his nursery . . .

All right, Adam Thirlwell’s not that young any more. He’s thirty-four, and thank God for that. Now I can read him for pure pleasure, without regretting my misspent years in juvenile detention. The pleasures of ‘Slow Motion’ are manifold. The playfulness of the language, the way the mandarin wit, line by line, consorts with grisly or louche material, is a signature we’ve come to recognize from Thirlwell’s previous work. But there’s an emotional rawness here that departs from the philosophical order of Politics and the narrative formality of The Escape. Edison Lo, Thirlwell’s narrator, is alive not only to mathematics but to postmodernity, where a thought may wander into your head ‘the way you see a cat drift through amateur porn footage’. And isn’t that what we’re looking for in the fiction we read, reality apprehended by a superior mind and yet not estranged by the effort, still containing things we recognize and can feel strongly about? The world rarified by art, yet kept down to earth. This is what I feel is happening in Thirlwell’s new fiction, and I can’t wait to read more.

Portrait of Adam Thirlwell by Nadav Kander as part of his series in The Best of Young British Novelists issue.

For more about the author, including critical perspectives and in-depth biographies, visit the British Council’s web pages on Adam Thirlwell.

Continuing a series of podcasts featuring our Best of Young British Novelists, today we bring you an interview with Joanna Kavenna. Kavenna grew up in various parts of Britain and has also lived in the US, France, Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltic States. She is the author of three novels: Inglorious, The Birth of Love and Come to the Edge, and one work of non-fiction, The Ice Museum. In 2008 she was awarded the Orange Prize for New Writing. ‘Tomorrow’, which appears in the issue, is an excerpt from a forthcoming novel. Here she spoke to deputy editor Ellah Allfrey about her incurable wander-lust, genre-hopping and why Nietzsche was wrong about the ordinary man.

For more about the author, including critical perspectives and in-depth biographies, visit the British Council’s web pages on Joanna Kavenna.

Chloe Aridjis was born in New York and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico City. Her first novel, Book of Clouds, published in 2009, won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in France. Her second, Asunder, published this month by Chatto & Windus, follows the strange inner life of Marie, a guard at the National Gallery in the present day. Marie becomes increasingly fascinated by the Suffragettes, and in particular Mary Richardson, who famously slashed the Rokeby Venus to protest the imprisonment of a fellow Suffragette, Emmeline Pankhurst. Here, she spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about writing against the male gaze, why the National Gallery is her favourite place in London and how paintings can also be mirrors.

TH: The novel explores the impact that the male gaze has had on how we imagine ourselves, particularly how women imagine themselves. The novel also questions what an artistic legacy is made of. As you write: ‘Velázquez established his legacy with brushstrokes, and Mary Richardson with knife strokes, both with impassioned diagonals.’ By focusing on the Suffragettes, were you interested in readdressing the violence of the male gaze?

CA: Once I’d had the idea of having a museum guard as narrator, I wrote the first draft in a male voice, but then realized it was much more interesting to explore the psychology of a female in that role. All day long they are surrounded by mythological figures, often nudes, and I thought that somehow there is more stripping of sexuality for women than men in this profession.

In the initial stages, as with my Berlin book, I would walk around the National Gallery taking notes, with the Rokeby Venus as my centre of gravity. I was looking for real or imagined sites of disturbance and how they would affect the psychology of my character.

Then there’s the leitmotif of craquelure in the book – the way the brushstrokes of the painter succumb to very slow kinds of decomposition and disintegration – but the Suffragettes take a much more active role in the destruction. There are two different kinds of legacy: one legacy damages, the other establishes. Mary Richardson was of course protesting the imprisonment of Pankhurst and I was fascinated by her autobiography, in which she describes her great irritation at the way men would come and gawp at the Venus all day.

For me, it may have had something to do with growing up in Mexico, where there is often very unabashed staring at women. But it’s something I’ve always noticed in very different spheres – the male gaze. It reappears later on in the book within a clinical context, the counterpart in Paris and the branding of female ‘hysterics’. They too are trapped by the male gaze.

Yes, Marie, the narrator, reacts very strongly to that pejorative use of ‘hysterics’.

That was something that outraged me: the way the Suffragettes were often described as hysterics by the press and other detractors.

The novel is a pressure cooker of female repression, with Marie unable to express her desires for fellow guard Daniel in particular. There’s a scene when she is staying in a room in Paris and is overwhelmed by the lingering presence of the couple who lived there previously, imagining their longings and frustrations. Is her distance from what she wants something you thought about while writing?

People who dismissed the Suffragettes would deride them as being sexually frustrated or say that they were terrified of ‘the unlived life’ and that that was part of what spurred them into action. Marie does see herself mirrored in almost every character in the book, and in some of the paintings, which can often be mirrors. Her anxieties about her professional and her personal life are similar. There is a constant recalibration of distance: distance from a painting, or from Daniel . . . in nearly every scene there’s an uncomfortable measuring going on. Distance and how you measure it is very important in the novel.

There’s a constant conflict in gallery spaces between preservation and entropy: they paradoxically suggest permanence and longevity but they’re full of transience, of people just passing through. The veteran guard Leighton Crooke epitomizes dedication to this almost monk-like existence. Is there a quasi-religious element to gallery spaces, do you think?

Yes. There’s the hush that falls, an expectation of how you should behave once inside. There’s theatre to it, an air of captivity, almost. And a resistance to stasis but also a desire for a very controlled environment. I was much more focused on the theme of impermanence. Every day at the National Gallery there was always something different going on. And I was inspired by an essay by Adorno (‘Valéry Proust Museum’) in which he says there’s not much difference between museum and mausoleum. He’s very critical of galleries as spaces because to his mind they are a slightly ridiculous reenactment of culture. He finds it problematic that they remove artworks from their original context. You can be ‘in’ culture and be having a cultural experience but there’s often a lack of authenticity about the experience of art. On the other hand I feel snobbish passing judgment – at least people are going to museums and engaging, trying to engage.

It sounds like going to the National Gallery was an important part of the writing process as was talking to the guards in person. Did you visit often?

It’s my favourite place in London. Early on I probably would go twice a week and spend several hours taking notes and then go home to write. But too much exposure can somehow cramp the imagination. So I’d go and take notes about one painting or one character I’d seen, or one strange interaction. I did speak to many, many guards but in the end none of them inspired any of the characters in the book, though they were extremely generous with their time and loved talking about their profession. Initially I was interested in the idea of invisibility but speaking to them I realized that it wasn’t an issue for them at all, that they were quite comfortable with someone walking past and not acknowledging their presence . . . After a while that became more interesting to me: the passivity of the profession. I also found interesting the way that many of them were surrounded by so much beauty and heritage and at the same time strangely impervious or indifferent to it. I also thought a lot about how someone in that profession’s thoughts might transition from one to another. I was less in pursuit of a so-called ‘seamless narrative’ and wanted to replicate more what the thought patterns might be, jumping from lighting to the sound of shoes, to people coming in and out. I really enjoyed just sitting there on a bench and watching, because I do feel that museums have strange effects on people psychologically – one does enter into a different mental atmosphere, regardless of how interested in art you happen to be.

Comets orbit the book, particularly in the painting by William Dyce. What was it that particularly drew you to these celestial bodies?

I was fascinated by the painting of Pegwell Bay at the Tate Britain. And also by the fact that somehow comets are both ephemeral and permanent – they pass overhead yet something of them remains. Then I came across a book by George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England. In it he mentions Prime Minister Asquith being on a boat and seeing Halley’s comet passing overhead, and reading it as an omen.

In the book Daniel says, ‘Life’s not complete without some kind of haunting’. To me the main ghost in this book is Mary Richardson. When did her ghost first speak to you?

I read Mary Richardson’s autobiography and at time she comes across badly and at others entirely sympathetically. In the context of the book, Marie’s main conflict is feeling allegiances with both gatekeepers and trespassers. She herself would probably have allowed Mary Richardson to come and deface the painting. What really struck me was the way the Suffragettes were pathologized, and the way women who took a political stance were deemed ‘hysterical’ in some way, or accused of hyperbole. And they came from the whole spectrum of society: you had noble suffragettes and working class ones (and they were treated differently in prison). These figures inhabit Marie’s mental landscape very strongly. In a way these are the women who are most alive to her. Her conflict, too, is that she doesn’t know to what extent she has inherited them. I suppose one of the questions the novel asks is how much do you create spectres for yourself and how much other processes are responsible.

It seems like there might be some parallels between the observing that gallery guards do and the observing that a novelist does. Would you say that’s true?

As a novelist you’re constantly observing, that’s why I thought a museum guard would be a very good job for someone who also wanted to write. It varies from gallery to gallery, but often the younger guards are aspiring artists, and others simply work in security. I’m quite shy but I do say hello to some of them when I go. The guard at the National Gallery with a stray eye is my favourite.

Asunder by Chloe Aridjis is published by Chatto & Windus.

Chloe Aridjis will be in conversation with Tom McCarthy at the London Review Bookshop on 7 May at 7.30 p.m. Tickets are £7. More details here.

Photo by melburnian.

For a while I worked as a temp, writing in the evening or whenever I could during the day. I was sent to a series of grey-drab, concrete offices, where I passed the hours typing out letters for jowly depressives, weathering their fits of bile, barely earning enough to pay my rent.

I remember those brief, unsatisfying periods of tenure as a series of rooms. Rooms jaundiced by bad lighting, so you wondered, what is ague, and could we have it? Rooms that hummed, a hum you couldn’t quite identify, or that seemed in the end to come from your own head. Rooms with high windows so you only saw the free birds weaving tactlessly across the sky. Rooms like a fairy tale, where everyone seemed to sleep, and yet, they spoke. Rooms where you thought the delicate gossamer strand that connects you to the world of certainties, measured opinions, received normality, might just snap – forever.

A fine and almost forgotten poet, Charlotte Mew, wrote on ‘rooms that have had their part/ In the steady slowing down of the heart.’ The heart slowed, yet, perversely, the clock slowed too. The hands of clocks on grey partitions seemed to stall, while you waited – willing Time to resume again. When you were there, stranded at your desk, typing out generic phrases, discoursing madly on pencils with your neighbour, you longed for the hours to vanish, and yet, when the day ended, when the sky boiled into one more livid sunset, you felt sick with longing, fury, frustration. You walked in a dire and futile rage to the underground, and you went home panicking – another day!

The whole temping experience made me dislike the modernists as well, or some of them. It made me lose faith in those post-Nietzscheans who condemned the ‘ordinary man’ (or woman), who decried ‘the masses’ and assumed the masses all felt and thought the same. Often, as I waited in some random flock of people, I thought about Ezra Pound’s seedy protégée, Richard Aldington, who stood in central London and wrote:

The Masses at Piccadilly
Are sordid and sweaty
We suspect them of vices
Like marriage and business
We know they are ignorant
Of Hokkei and Rufinus

Or Amy Lowell, ‘imagist’, who added:

Fools! It is always the dead who breed!
The little people are ignorant
They chatter and swarm
They gnaw like rats . . .

I ranted my way home each night – as I stood with my kind, as we swarmed into a mass, as we breathed in unison, like ladybirds in a cluster, related and merged organic matter, as I stood and swayed – I hated Aldington, Lowell, felt that had they not been so utterly dead I would have found them and beaten them to the ground, a futile fantasy of vengeance on the long dead, but I thought, how easy, how glorious, to set yourself against the masses, when you have been saved by wealth or accident, how easy to denounce the Others –

Others to you, perpetually unknowable –

But when you are the masses, sordid in your seamlessness, sweating from proximity to others, trapped in the little business of earning a wage –

Well, then! You rant . . .

The irony of this condition is that each day you pass through such furies, such protests, you grit your teeth, you want to fall to the ground, you’re like an angry child, you weep because someone has stolen your coffee cup and you teeter all the time on the brink of complete psychosis. Meanwhile you discern this madness in the eyes of others – you come to realize the entire city is, essentially, mad –

And yet you sleep, in your unhomely home, you wake to the ritual whine of planes, the old grey buildings polished by the dawn, you are calm, even optimistic, and you begin again. You rise, you eat breakfast, as if the whole thing is entirely reasonable, you dress with practised efficiency, you are sane at least until 10 a.m. Then – again – someone bores you, someone snaps their pencil in your face, someone speaks for hours, then further hours, on the phone, so you want to run from the building and never go back again. Swiftly, you dwindle.

Perhaps this was what made Aldington, Lowell so uneasy, confronted by the crowds. Perhaps they were worried that one day their sordid sweaty masses would just lose their wits entirely, run amok, that the city would engulf itself –

Aldington and all his pals, hemmed into a corner, clutching the complete works of Rufinus . . .

The fantasy consoles you for a moment, one long tick of the clock –

Then you begin again –

For more about the author, including critical perspectives and in-depth biographies, visit the British Council’s web pages on Joanna Kavenna.

In the latest Granta Podcast we bring you an interview with Best of Young British Novelist, Naomi Alderman. Described by Rachel Seiffert as ‘someone who can do funny’, Alderman is the author of three novels: Disobedience, The Lessons and The Liars’ Gospel. She writes and designs computer games and is co-creator of Zombies, Run!, the best-selling iPhone fitness game and audio adventure. A professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University, she has been paired with Margaret Atwood in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Here, Alderman speaks to deputy editor Ellah Allfrey about her engagement with the world around her and the joys of writing to genre. ‘Soon and in Our Days’, which is published in the issue, is a new story.

For more about the author, including critical perspectives and in-depth biographies, visit the British Council’s web pages on Naomi Alderman.

Photo of Saud Alsanousi accepting his prize by Kheridine Mabrouk.

On Tuesday 23 April, in Abu Dhabi, Saud Alsanousi was announced winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. In this podcast, recorded the morning after the announcement, deputy editor Ellah Allfrey spoke to Alsanousi about the place of guest workers in the Gulf countries, book clubs in Kuwait and the writing life. The podcast is in English and Arabic.

Saud Alasanousi is a Kuwaiti novelist and journalist, born in 1981. His work has appeared in a number of Kuwaiti publications, including Al-Watan newspaper and Al-Arabi, Al-Kuwait and Al-Abwab magazines. He currently writes for Al-Qabas newspaper. His first novel, The Prisoner of Mirrors, was published in 2010 and in the same year won the fourth Leila Othman Prize, awarded for novels and short stories by young writers. In the ‘Stories on the Air’ competition, organized in July 2011 by Al-Arabi magazine with BBC Arabic, he won first place for his story ‘The Bonsai and the Old Man’.

Synopsis of the novel, Saq al-Bamboo (The Bamboo Stalk) published by Arab Scientific Publishers Beirut, 2012

Josephine comes to Kuwait from the Philippines to work as a house servant, leaving behind her studies and family, who are pinning their hoped for a better future on her. In the house where she works, she meets Rashid, the spoiled only son of Ghanima and Issa. After a brief love affair, he decides to marry Josephine, on the condition that the marriage remains a secret. But things do not go according to plan. Josephine becomes pregnant with José and Rashid abandons both mother and baby. They return to the Philippines. There José grows up in poverty, clinging to the hope of returning to his father’s country when he is eighteen. It is at this point that the novel, which Alsanousi writers as a translation from the son’s Filipino text into Arabic, begins.

This is a daring work which looks at the phenomenon of foreign workers in Arab countries and deals with the problem of identity through the life of a young man of mixed race who returns to Kuwait, the ‘dream’ or ‘heaven’ which his mother had described to him since he was a child.

The 2013 Shortlist:

Hail Mary by Sinan Antoon (Iraqi)
Published by Al-Jamal

Me, She and the Other Women by Jana Elhassan (Lebanese)
Published by Arab Scientific Publishers

The Beaver by Mohammed Hasan Alwan (Saudi Arabian)
Published by Dar al-Saqi

Our Master by Ibrahim Issa (Egyptian)
Published by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation

The Bamboo Stalk by Saud Alsanousi (Kuwaiti)
Published by Arab Scientific Publishers

His Excellency the Minister by Hussein Al-Wad (Tunisian)
Published by Dar al-Janub

We continue an online series of former Best of Young British Novelists introducing writers from the fourth edition, with Rachel Seiffert (1983) on Naomi Alderman.

Now here’s someone who can do funny. Properly, skillfully. So not only does she have me laughing as I read, but also scrolling back again after I’ve finished on an how exactly did she do that? quest through the pages.

Ms Alderman’s is a penetrating gaze, directed at Hendon’s orthodox and deeply suburban, small-c-conservative Jewish community, but her’s a warm way of looking too. Incisive in her choice of detail – the just-paid-off Renault Espace, the ‘not to boast’ turn of phrase – she nails her characters quickly, but at some point – where was it? I’ve looked and looked! – she got me fond of her characters. It is a subtle satire which allows for self-knowledge in its protagonists.

Ms Alderman employs a useful literary device: the stranger who reveals a community to itself. But what a stranger! A biblical prophet, no less; no half measures. And again, within that boldness, there is both precision and nuance. Elijah, for all his ability to command Yahweh’s fire from heaven, is replete with human failings, and so in his turn also elicits my human fellow-feeling; not unlike that difficult uncle, for whom you retain a soft spot, even while he embarrasses you rigid in public.

So, to summarise: witty, bold, and delicate too. Oh yes, and supremely able to turn a story. Mazel tov, Ms Alderman; I take my hat off.

Naomi Alderman is the author of three novels: Disobedience, The Lessons and The Liars’ Gospel. She writes and designs computer games and is co-creator of Zombies, Run!, the best-selling iPhone fitness game and audio adventure. A professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University, she has been paired with Margaret Atwood in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. She is currently working on her fourth novel. ‘Soon and in Our Days’ is a new story.

Portrait of Naomi Alderman by Nadav Kander as part of his series in the issue: The Best of Young British Novelists.

For more, including critical perspectives and in-depth biographies, visit the British Council’s webpages on Naomi Alderman and Rachel Seiffert.

Photo of Orchestra Baobab.

1. In a Sentimental Mood by John Coltrane

Perhaps it’s because I was raised by a music-loving mother, perhaps because I studied piano, cello, music theory – whatever the reason, my approach to prose is informed by my sense of sound. For me, notes tell stories; stories are melodies. No piece of music makes this point more clearly than Coltrane’s. Those first seven notes of ‘In a Sentimental Mood’ hit my ears like words, not notes. I shall never tell stories as well as Coltrane’s alto sax, but it’s my greatest joy to try.

2. Prelude in C Sharp Minor by Sergei Rachmaninov

The first three chords of Rachmaninov – especially as played by Sergei himself – seem to announce the death of a man, a minor key ‘Kweku is dead’. That the piece then gives way to such gentle sounds – full of longing, questioning, even vulnerability – thrills me to no end. This is how I try to write, what I like to hear, to read: heavy followed by featherweight, pathos by softness, by silence.

3. Fool for You by Cee-Lo Green, performed by Alice Smith

The first time I heard this track by Cee-Lo Green, I thought: ‘this is a perfect song.’ It literally made my shoulders move, my heart pound more quickly. Pure sexy. But then the unimaginable happened: I heard perfection perfected. Alice Smith’s cover is consummate: raw, gorgeous, rough, smooth. It reminds me that there’s nothing new under the sun, no new stories to tell – but always a way to use one’s own voice to create a singular shine.

4. Sing, Sing, Sing performed by BBC Big Band Orchestra

When I’m stuck, I put this song on blast and dance around my apartment. Sometimes I think I should have been born in the twenties, other times that I could still yet write a cabaret. The drums, the horns, that honey-thick sound: I just get happy. No matter how frustrated I am with my fiction, I never cease to delight in my fantasy cabaret.

5. Summertime performed by Kat Edmonson

If I had to pick a favorite song, it would be ‘Summertime’. I have an endless collection of covers, including the amazing ones by Janis Joplin and Yuya Uchida and the Flowers. But, for my money, Kat Edmonson takes the cake. Her cover of ‘Summertime’ on the album ‘Take to the Sky’ is so beautiful, you feel it as much as you hear it. That moody piano, those lazy chord progressions feel a bit like water; you feel it in your chest somehow. It makes you want to make art.

6. Utrus Horas by Orchestra Baobab

I played this song on repeat for weeks while writing Ghana Must Go. Alas, I can’t listen to music while writing – it feels a bit like trying to compose music with the radio on – but I’ll often play one song nonstop in the hours between bursts of inspiration. Orchestra Baobab’s 1982 ‘Pirates Choice’ is a flawless album, this first track ‘Utrus Horas’ the ultimate feel-good song.

For more about the author, including critical perspectives and in-depth biographies, visit the British Council’s web pages on Taiye Selasi.

Continuing a series of podcasts featuring our Best of Young British Novelists, today we bring you an interview with Taiye Selasi. Selasi was born in London to Nigerian and Ghanaian parents. She made her fiction debut in Granta in 2011 with ‘The Sex Lives of African Girls’, which was selected for Best American Short Stories in 2012. Her first novel, Ghana Must Go, was published in March 2013. Here she spoke to deputy editor Ellah Allfrey about her mother’s garden, Rachmaninov and learning to speak Italian.

Author photo by Nancy Crampton.

For more about the author, including critical perspectives and in-depth biographies, visit the British Council’s web pages on Taiye Selasi.

Granta Best of Young British Novelists 4: Sunjeev Sahota from Granta magazine on Vimeo.

In the third and final in a series of specially commissioned short films celebrating Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 4, we introduce you to Sunjeev Sahota, who was born in Derby and currently lives in Leeds with his wife and daughter. His first novel, Ours are the Streets, was published in 2011. ‘Arrivals’ is an excerpt from The Year of the Runaways, his unfinished novel, forthcoming from Picador. Here we join Sahota as he visits the Sikh Temple in Leeds near where he lives, and talks about first picking up Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and about how having a divided sense of homeland stokes his writing.

You can also read an introduction to Sunjeev Sahota by Salman Rushdie, here.

You can also watch the first two in this series of short films, on Adam Foulds and Nadifa Mohamed.

Commissioned in collaboration with the British Council.

Directed and produced by The Film Atelier.

You can also see Sunjeev Sahota at the following events:

University of Leeds Student Event

8 May, 3.30 p.m. to 5 p.m., University of Leeds. For further details, please contact Professor John McLeod: j.m.mcleod@leeds.ac.uk.

If you’ve ever thought about a career in publishing, as a writer, editor or publicist, then make sure you attend this professionalization event in the School of English. Two speakers - Sunjeev Sahota (writer, recently named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, 2013) and Saskia Vogel (Granta magazine publicist, writer and translator) - will share their experience of how to make it in the literary and publishing world.

The Leeds Launch
8 May, 7 p.m., Waterstones, 93-97 Albion Street, Leeds LS1 5JS. £4, free to Granta subscribers. Call the store at 0113 244 4588 to book.

Sunjeev Sahota and Evie Wyld join Granta’s Saskia Vogel for readings and conversation.

For more about the author, including critical perspectives and in-depth biographies, visit the British Council’s web pages on Sunjeev Sahota.

‘Just Right’ is an extract of a novella that I am not going to write. Another book – set in the future instead of the past – recently got in the way, consigning Donovan Kendal and the rest of his family to a desktop file called ‘Unfinished Things.’ There should be a special term for abandoned stories, and another for the strange limbo in which their occupants live. Poor Donovan Kendal – neither wholly real nor entirely fictional, stuck in a long ago New York, but with half the streets unmapped and his childhood tapering off into a few, sad notes and then a blank page, and then another. He was meant to get from Washington Square in 1973 to Hurricane Sandy in a hundred and twenty pages. What remains comes from the beginning of his journey, before he or I knew he wasn’t going to get any further.

Portrait of Zadie Smith by Nadav Kander (based on a photograph © Dominique Nabokov). Smith was unable to attend the shoot due to pregnancy.

For more about the author, including critical perspectives and in-depth biographies, visit the British Council’s web pages on Zadie Smith.

In the first partnership of its kind, Audible and Granta magazine are collaborating on the unabridged audiobook production of Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4, which was released via audible.co.uk and audible.com on 16 April. The wider aims of the partnership are to broaden the audience for literary fiction through a new, accessible format and to encourage writers to engage with spoken word from the start of their careers. In this short film deputy editor of Granta, Ellah Allfrey, offers a glimpse of how the list was created, and writers from the issue discuss why reading aloud enhances their work and what it was like to get the call saying they had been selected.

Granta Best of Young British Novelist 4: Nadifa Mohamed from Granta magazine on Vimeo.

In the second of three specially commissioned short films celebrating Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 4, we introduce you to Nadifa Mohamed, who was born in Somalia and raised in South London. Mohamed’s first novel Black Mamba Boy (which was shortlisted for numerous prizes and won the Betty Trask Award) was inspired by the life of her father who was forced to leave Somalia and set out on an odyssey that brought him to the UK. Here we join her as she explores Shepherd’s Bush Market, where there is a large Somali community, hear about her next novel (excerpted in the issue) and learn why she wants to be the griot, or storyteller, of the London she grew up in.

You can also watch the first in this series of short films, on Adam Foulds.

Commissioned in collaboration with the British Council.

Directed and produced by The Film Atelier.

For more about the author, including critical perspectives and in-depth biographies, visit the British Council’s web pages on Nadifa Mohamed.

Continuing a series of podcasts on our Best of Young British Novelists 4, today we bring you an interview with Evie Wyld. Wyld’s first novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, which follows the lives of two men, Frank and Leon, who live decades apart but on the same wild coastline in Queensland, Australia, and was shortlisted for numerous awards and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and a Betty Trask Award. Her second novel All the Birds, Singing, is excerpted in the issue. Here Wyld talks to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about why living in Peckham makes it easier to write about rural Australia, how memory informs her stories and why she can’t write a novel without at least one shark in it.

Author image by Roeloff Bakker.

For more about the author, including critical perspectives and in-depth biographies, visit the British Council’s web pages on Evie Wyld.