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Irish Times
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Author Gethan Dick: ‘I'd make it illegal to buy or sell water. Everyone would adapt within a few weeks'
Tell me about your debut novel, Water in The Desert, Fire in the Night It's about hope, hunger, gold, wolves, Streatham, Cuba, post-apocalyptic feminism, pregnancy and bicycles. It's about the porousness of the female bodily experience, the challenges of being an empiricist with a sample size of one, what's worth knowing and what's worth living and the necessity of irrationality. It's about an underachieving young woman, a retired midwife and a charismatic Dubliner who set out from London after the end of the world to cycle to a sanctuary in the southern Alps. And it's about the fact that the thing about the end of the world is that it happens all the time. You did a master's in creative writing at Goldsmiths in London more than 20 years ago but did not pursue writing fiction. Why not? I disliked the distance you have in fiction between making something yourself and having an acknowledgment that it has been made. After my master's I continued working with writing, but I wrote for spoken-word performance or for zines that I or other people edited, and I studied visual arts at Camberwell College of Art and started making text-based visual works, because those were all ways to feel like what I'd written was 'made'. So writing was usually in there somewhere, it just wasn't in the form that writing usually comes packaged in. When I moved to France in 2011 the bit of my brain that deals with language was occupied with assimilating French for quite a while and I didn't write anything made up for a few years, but stories and text still held a place in our visual arts projects. What prompted you to turn to writing as opposed to visual arts to tell this story? During all that, I'd talk every now and then about writing a novel about the end of the world – so I guess I always thought I'd get around to it one day. But I definitely never would have if it hadn't been for [my partner] Myles saying, when we got back from a slightly survivalist two-month stint in a stone shepherds' hut during the first Covid lockdown, 'Stop talking about it and write it now.' [ Irish debut authors 2025: It's already shaping up to be a vintage year Opens in new window ] You have been working as an artist with Myles, first in London, and for many years now in Marseilles. Did this influence the novel? Definitely, but in silhouette. Myles and I make the visual arts work together, so at first I kept trying to get him to write the book with me, but he stuck to his guns and got me to do it for myself. Instead he became the motor for our other projects so that I had the time and brain-space to write. He wouldn't look at it until I felt I had a full first draft – he didn't want to contaminate it and our working practice is generally so meshed that it would have been impossible not to. When I had the draft, he did the initial edit, so he definitely had a hand in it, but it's just my name on it and it's unusual for me to have a 'solo' project going out into the world – that hasn't happened in a long time. Also, our art projects are usually multilayered, many-headed things: dozens to hundreds of participants, a cultural institution, a noncultural institution, local groups, in-situ installations, municipal permissions and so on. To be able to turn my back on all the logistics of whatever tentacular art project we were working on and, for a week or three, do something that just involved me, a notebook and a pencil, was a lovely counterpoint. READ MORE Modern technology and infrastructure no longer function in your novel. Was the pandemic a prompt or was it something that you had begun thinking about before? Well, this question assumes that modern technology and infrastructure currently function, which I'm not convinced they do, or, if they do then you have to examine pretty carefully who they function for, to what end and at what cost. If, like Audaz, you survived an apocalypse, to where would you make a pilgrimage? To misquote William Gibson, the apocalypse is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. Audaz has an exceptional memory. Do you have any such skills? I have a special talent for not hearing somebody if I'm not looking at them, which is fantastic for making it really embarrassing for anyone who tries to get my attention in a crowded public space. Will there be a second book or is it back to the studio? Both I hope. But in the immediate term back to the studio. I'd make it illegal to buy or sell water. You could start by banning producing and selling bottled water in Europe right now Which projects are you working on? We're towards the end of Acqua Lambro, in Milan, where we're creating an impossible luxury mineral water brand: we built a machine-sculpture from detritus gathered from the Lambro, one of Europe's most polluted rivers, and it transforms the river's water river into pure drinking water. It works – we've had the water it produces analysed. We showed the machine and a prototype bottle – glass, but made to look like the crushed plastic water bottles that fill the river – at Milan Design Week last month. We're about to restage We All Fall/Récit, an immersive performance piece we co-created, inspired by the stories of people who have made the journey to seek asylum in Europe, in which a choreography creates large-scale cyanotype prints of people's bodies. And we're mid-production on Espèces Humaines/Fides for La Monnaie de Paris (the museum attached to the French mint). We're making an installation, inspired both by imagery related to economic collapse and by indigo cloth-money, about the fact that money is, at its origin, an act of collective faith. Who do you admire the most? Palestinian Red Crescent workers and journalists. You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish? I'd make it illegal to buy or sell water. You could start by banning producing and selling bottled water in Europe right now. It would have so many benefits and everyone would adapt within a few weeks. The best and worst things about where you live? Marseilles is chaotic, grubby, ill-disciplined, unprofessional, heel-dragging, short-tempered and nothing, absolutely nothing, ever happens the way it's supposed to. I love it. I'm not even going to tell you all the other things that are great about it – there are already way too many tourists. Water in The Desert, Fire in the Night is published by Tramp Press
The Guardian
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Palestinian author Yasmin Zaher wins Dylan Thomas prize with ‘audacious' novel The Coin
A novel about a Palestinian woman who participates in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags has won this year's Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize. Palestinian journalist Yasmin Zaher took home the £20,000 prize – awarded to writers aged 39 or under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age – for her debut novel The Coin. She was announced as the winner at a ceremony in Swansea, Thomas's birthplace. The Coin, chosen in a unanimous decision by judges, 'is a borderless novel, tackling trauma and grief with bold and poetic moments of quirkiness and humour', said writer and judging chair Namita Gokhale. 'It fizzes with electric energy', with Zaher bringing 'complexity and intensity to the page through her elegantly concise writing'. Born in 1991 in Jerusalem, Zaher studied biomedical engineering at Yale University and creative writing at the New School, where she was advised by the novelist Katie Kitamura. Kitamura described The Coin as a 'brilliant, audacious, powerhouse of a novel. A story of obsession and appetite, politics and class, it is deliciously unruly. An exceptional debut by an outrageous new talent.' The novel follows a wealthy Palestinian woman as she tries to set down roots in New York, teaching in a school for underprivileged boys. However, she begins to feel stifled in the US, and develops an obsession with cleanliness and purity. In an interview last July, Zaher said that she had 'very mixed feelings' about her novel coming out at this time. 'Publishing a novel is a dream come true for me, but the joy is muted by grief. Deep inside, I also know that current events are driving some of the interest in the book, and I feel very uncomfortable with that, because I never considered myself as speaking in the name of my people. 'But I tell myself that identity is not pure, that life is messy, and, maybe most importantly, that literature is at its best when it resists the boxes.' Rapture's Road by Seán Hewitt (Cape) Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (Fig Tree) The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Viking) I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson (Faber) Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good by Eley Williams (4th Estate) The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (Footnote) Other writers shortlisted for this year's prize were Rapture's Road by Seán Hewitt, Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson and Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good by Eley Williams. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Alongside Gokhale on the judging panel were the writer Jan Carson, poet Mary Jean Chan, critic Max Liu and academic Daniel Williams. Previous winners of the prize, launched in 2006, include Max Porter, Bryan Washington and Patricia Lockwood. Last year, Caleb Azumah Nelson won the award for his novel Small Worlds. 'Zaher is an extraordinary winner to mark 20 years of this vital prize,' said Gokhale.
New York Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
When Childhood Trauma Gives Way to Adult Ambivalence
What surprised me most about Honor Jones's debut novel, 'Sleep,' wasn't its smarts or its savvy, or even its astute renderings of motherhood, daughter-hood and the fraught enterprise of trying to regard each one through the lens of the other. No, what surprised me was that out of its careful, orderly prose — every word neatly placed as if on a well-set table — grew an exceptionally moving novel. Jones takes her cues from writers like John Cheever, Richard Yates and Virginia Woolf, all masters of the repressed and unsayable. She covers the same material — the resentments and traumas that smolder in families wrapped in a suburban idyll — and with similar delicacy and humor. But 'Sleep' also introduces a measure of optimism and generosity I found refreshing. 'Sleep' doesn't have the best start, but stick with it. The novel opens with the slightly humdrum threshold moments of 10-year-old Margaret's life as she begins to notice her body and debate who she is in the world, a girl or a woman. (At the shoe store: 'She definitely wasn't going to wear light-up Disney sneakers, but she wasn't going to wear purple velvet stilettos either.') It all feels like a familiar coming-of-age story until Margaret experiences something no child should, putting a more sinister spin on what it means to 'come of age' well before your time. From here the third-person perspective matures into Margaret's adulthood, and the novel matures into something more poignant, and interesting, as well. Margaret is now a 35-year-old magazine editor in New York City, and a newly divorced mother of two young daughters. It's the beginning of the #MeToo movement and most of the pieces she works on are first-person accounts of unwanted male attention. The pitches run the gamut, and come in with manipulative urgency — 'by speaking up we, by telling our stories we, never again will we,' Margaret thinks. 'How did one become part of it, speak on behalf of it — that confident plural voice?' Margaret is ambivalent about these stories and her own. What narrative should her childhood experience fall into? And how should she tell this story to herself as she contends with being both a parent to girls and a daughter to an aging mother, Elizabeth, on whose watch Margaret suffered? Jones is interested in the liminal space Margaret finds herself in, a space more psychological than generational: a state of consciousness that hovers between her past and present, resembling the uncertain and unstable experience of sleep. The novel excels when exploring this extrasensory place where we come to terms with our lives. If this sounds fey, part of the pleasure of 'Sleep' is that it's grounded in the prosaic; it traces a series of familial episodes that should feel banal but that are instead shot through with feeling. Take a scene where Margaret goes to pick up her daughters from her ex-husband Ezra's apartment. She's trying to corral the kids, but they are stalling. Five-year-old Jo keeps knocking things out of the medicine cabinet, including Ezra's new girlfriend's anti-wrinkle cream. Eight-year-old Helen is coloring a picture of her grandmother's house in New Jersey. Shortly they will all be visiting this house for a weekend to celebrate Jo's birthday. The stakes of the weekend are high: Elizabeth is overbearing, demanding, matriarch of the unsaid. The stakes of Margaret picking up her daughters are low. It's in the intersection of the two that Jones brandishes her artistry: It's chilling: the ex-husband gleefully watching his wife trying to shepherd the kids while he just sits there. Helen innocently drawing the house where Margaret suffered. The light that stops at the window. Jones is very good at capturing how trauma can taint even small moments like these, in subtle and insidious ways — which is perhaps why she's styled her prose so tightly. There are no crescendos here, no soaring, looping sentences full of ecstasy or dread. Instead she's hung her prose on a tension rod of unease, a proxy for how Margaret experiences her everyday life. It's tidy, and it works.
CBC
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Natalie Sue and David Huebert among finalists for $60K Amazon Canada First Novel Award
Social Sharing Authors Natalie Sue and David Huebert are among the six finalists for the 2025 Amazon Canada First Novel Award. The $60,000 award is a collaboration between Amazon Canada and The Walrus recognizing the best debut Canadian novel of the year. The remaining finalists will each receive $6,000. Sue is nominated for her novel I Hope This Finds You Well, which follows Jolene, an anxious admin for Supershops, Inc., as she navigates a workplace of unsatisfactory colleagues. Jolene copes with the frustrations of her office job through passive aggressive messages in emails that are never meant to be seen. When she is caught and reprimanded, an IT mishap results in her having access to the confidential messages of her superiors. Can Jolene use this to the advantage of her career? The 2025 CBC Poetry Prize is accepting submissions! Sue is a Calgary-based writer of Iranian and British descent. I Hope This Finds You Well is her debut novel. Huebert is shortlisted for Oil People, which is a novel set in southwestern Ontario, and weaves together two narratives and timelines to unravel family secrets and the toxic yet powerful nature of oil. The novel tells the story of 13-year-old Jade Armbruster in 1987, who is living on the family's deteriorating oil farm, as her parents decide what to do about the land and their business. Jade's teenage experiences are juxtaposed with the 1862 story of Clyde Armbruster, who built the oil farm, and the rivalry he develops with his neighbours. Huebert is a Halifax-based writer who has won the CBC Short Story Prize and The Walrus Poetry Prize. He is the author of short story collections Peninsula Sinking, which won a Dartmouth Book Award and was a runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and Chemical Valley, which won the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize. The other shortlisted authors are Quebec's Valérie Bah for Subterrane, B.C.'s Andrew Boden for When We Were Ashes, Alberta's Benjamin Hertwig for Juiceboxers and B.C.'s Myriam Lacroix for How It Works Out. In Bah's Subterrane, Zeynab is working on a documentary on the margins of New Stockholm, a North American city. Cipher Falls is a polluted, industrial wasteland where artists and anti-capitalists are forced to work dead-end jobs to survive. Zeynab focuses her documentary on Doudou Laguerre, an activist who mysteriously died — and the potential that his death had something to do with his dissent against a construction project. 4 Black Canadian writers to watch in 2025, according to book aficionados Ryan B. Patrick & Alicia Cox Thomson Boden's We Were Ashes follows Rainor Schacht, who revisits his past as a child in a ward for disabled children in a remote hospital called Trutzburg in Nazi Germany. Rainor sets out to find another survivor, Emmi, after discovering the kind bus driver's coded diary, and the two piece together their fragmented memories of a horrible place. In Hertwig's Juiceboxers, Plinko is a 16-year-old undergoing basic training before finishing high school. When he moves in with an older soldier, he and the other roommates, people from all different backgrounds, build an unlikely friendship. After 9/11, the military plans to go to war in Afghanistan so the young men are sent to the battlefields of Kandahar and are forever changed. Lacroix's How It Works Out explores the hypothetical questions we often ask ourselves about relationships — what if we had taken a different job, moved to another city, or never met that person? The novel pushes these "what ifs" to the extreme: what if one of you were a power-hungry CEO and the other an employee, or even a reptile and a dog? Through a series of surreal and vulnerable realities, one couple navigates countless alternate versions of their relationship. The jury is composed of writers Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Liz Harmer, Chelene Knight and Shani Mootoo. The winner will be announced at an in-person award ceremony in Toronto on June 5, 2025.
