We have revealed Owen Sheers’ selection of 10 writers for the International Literature Showcase and on the podcast this week Owen is talking to Chitra Ramaswamy about his list and how the writers are asking the questions that will shape our future.
Owen Sheers is an author, poet and playwright and Professor in Creativity at Swansea University. In the conversation you’ll discover the details of Owen’s list, including his introduction to each writer and the reasons why he finds their work to be so important – spanning topics including the environment, structural inequality and the role of a writer at times of transition and change.
What role can writers play in shaping a more just world, and how do we ensure that we don’t go back to ‘business as usual’ after such a catastrophic event?
A transcript of this episode is available below.
The ILS is a partnership project between the National Centre for Writing and British Council, supported by Arts Council England and Creative Scotland.
Hosted by Simon Jones and Steph McKenna.
Find out more about the International Literature Showcase
Music by Bennet Maples.
Transcript
CHITRA
My name is Chitra Ramaswamy, I’m an author and journalist and today I’m in conversation with author, poet and playwright Owen Sheers, who will be revealing his selection of 10 of the most inspiring UK writers who are asking the questions that will shape the future. The list was commissioned by the National Centre for Writing and British Council, supported by Arts Council England as part of the International Literature Showcase, a 2-year programme to promote writing from the UK to new international audiences.
Hello, Owen.
OWEN
Hi there Chitra, how are you?
CHITRA
I’m good thanks, how are you?
OWEN
Yeah, I’m great thanks. I’ve found a spot in the house where I think my sort-of being homeschooled children can’t be heard.
CHITRA
Well done! Well, I’m barricaded in an upstairs room with an extremely big bag of washing put against the door so no-one can come in. We’ll see how we get on.
So, Owen, it feels appropriate – it feels like the times dictate, in fact – that we begin in the present, which is lockdown and the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. I think we’re probably in week 8, or 800, or I’m not quite sure anymore. But I just wondered if , you know, you could begin by painting a bit of a picture of your lockdown life. Your writing life at home at the moment. How’s it all going?
OWEN
Yeah, well, it’s a fascinating mixture, isn’t it? As I’m sure lots of writers are saying, in one way there hasn’t been that much change to my personal life – well, no, I should say my personal working life. There’s always a pretty large amount of self-isolation in writing, holed up in my writing shed on the side of a hill in Wales. So i guess the biggest changes are that we’ve put two young children into that mix.
CHITRA
It’s quite a change!
OWEN
Which is actually quite a change. My wife also works from home, so we’re actually very lucky, in that we’re able to split the working week straight down the middle, so I do still get two and a half days per week. And for the rest of the week, I have to admit, having the kids at home – and I’m not sure how successful we’ve really been with homeschooling – but it’s been mostly a real joy.
But, I’m aware that we’re speaking from the privilege of being on the side of that hill in Wales, so we have space, we have access to nature. I’m aware that that’s something that so many other people don’t have. So yeah, in short it’s kind of been some really strangely lovely times, interspersed with evenings of apocalyptic dread. Shards of reality every now and then puncturing through.
CHITRA
I know, it’ s a very kind of complex, melting pot of emotions, isn’t it? And I wondered, even asking you the question – beginning with the most humdrum of questions, ‘how are you?’ – but those words have become so much more pregnant with meaning, haven’t they? When we’re asking people now how they are, we’re really meaning it, and that made me wonder what the pandemic is doing to words, and to writing. Is it increasing its meaning, does it feel more important, or in other ways does it feel more defunct and too distant of the business of key workers and that idea that writing can’t actually fix a broken leg, or ventilate a patient. How are you feeling about your craft at the moment?
OWEN
Well, it’s a really good question and it dovetails really with how this selection came about, really, as well. That question, that I’ve always had for whatever reason, I don’t know why, what is a writer’s contribution? If a writer wants to put their shoulder to the wheel, how might they do that?
And of course I know that there should be no ‘shoulds’ in literature. The only duty of any writer is to try to be as good as they can be, but in this period it is interesting – I was talking last night with my wife, and there’s a lot of discussion of how people are turning to drawing and art as a way of looking in the moment, and as a a way of feeling a connection through all of this distance. And I suppose writing, as a form, doesn’t feel as immediately accessible to so many people in that way. But what it can do in this period, I think, and what I suspect it IS doing, is that it can pay that close attention. It can be a form of highly attuned memory, and that’s what I’m interested in.
Yes, you’re right, it feels very far from the lives and the jobs of key workers, but in the months and the years after this, in terms of joining the dots and asking the questions: how were those key workers treated? How often did we hear their voices? What were their lives like before this? How have some of the narratives become blunted, how have they become broad?
So that paying attention, that inquisitive aspect of writing, I think will have a huge part to play. And to come back to your question: how are we? What I have found fascinating is that, yes, people are asking that in terms of each other’s mental health, our physical health, but we are aware of this wider conversation of how are we? How do we live? Who are we? What are our ways of being? I think that’s something else, another territory that writers I hope – I think they already are playing into, actually – that questioning.
Hold on, let’s take this pause, take this change as an opportunity to ask these questions. Because we all knew, before this happened, that things have to change. That there has to be systemic change. In a way, one of the biggest obstacles, it seemed to me, or one that people spoke about, was about how capable are we of radical, cultural change? And this current crisis is tragic, but if it has shown us one thing it’s that we can change. So I think that’s really interesting. In that area, language is certainly feeling sharper, once more.
CHITRA
Absolutely. And this idea that you speak of there, Owen, of our duty as writers to somehow record the present moment, whatever that happens to be, and this one is a deep crisis, is a real reminder of what you’ve been doing in your recent work. I’m thinking of The Green Hollow, for example, about the Aberfan mining tragedy, and the mining village, or I’m thinking about your poem, the NHS 70th anniversary poem – this idea of poem as a kind of reportage, influenced so much by events as they’re happening.
OWEN
Yes, that’s right. And I guess I moved towards those projects, and the form of them, which is a kind of verse drama, really as a way of answering that question that has dogged me for a while. Perhaps I took the easy route in answering it, but a route I’ve become increasingly fascinated by, which is the writer as a conduit for the voices and stories of others.
In some ways, I suppose, it goes back to that bardic idea. To create these communal stories through lots of individual experiences. In all of those projects, they very much begin, I suppose, in the world of journalism with primary evidence and lots and lots of interviews with other people, and they create composite characters to hold and render these stories.
And I suppose that was my slightly clumsy answer to that question. How can you contribute? And it’s given me a huge amount as a writer, because this is very much a two-way process. it’s not entirely altruistic – yes, I’m very interested in giving voice to voices who haven’t had the chance to be heard before, but also what you receive as a writer is extraordinary. I’m always amazed by the generosity of people to offer up their experience into these kind of things.
And I suppose, you’re absolutely right, it was that experience, over those two projects and an early one called Pink Mist which was based on interviews with recently injured service personnel and their families. It was the experience of that which led towards the selection that we’re talking about today, in that I suppose I was interested in finding writers who were answering that call, perhaps in more subtle ways and more inventive ways that I have myself.
CHITRA
We’ll come on to that selection. It’s such a fascinating and diverse chorus of voices that you’ve picked. It really does speak to your own concerns as a writer, as well as the moment in which we find ourselves. If we could stick with that moment for a minute longer, I think it’s so interesting to think of – do you see it as a direction that your work has taken, this notion of giving voice, or poetry as reportage or place or prose, even? Is it something that’s happened as a kind of response to living in a period of great crisis, turbulence – I’m thinking of pre-Covid here. Brexit, what’s happening in America, climate emergency. It’s a moment of emergency, cultural and climate and political. Has it changed you as a writer?
OWEN
I think it has. Undoubtedly. It brings with it all sorts of risks, and I think you touched upon it there in your question. It’s when things start to feel urgent – in your life, in the imminent futures of your children, and that urgency rises tot a certain level within you, when it has to be addressed.
And so initially, I think, it also comes from a sense of frustration. Maybe in some cases a sense of anger, even. Certainly Pink Mist, that project with service personnel, rose out of me coming into contact with much more nuanced and worrying and disturbing stories of the long shadow of conflict, and how that shadow falls across families and communities. Those dots weren’t being joined, stories weren’t being told.
Your instinct as any writer is to provide a counter-narrative to any anonymising source. And so certainly with the NHS piece, more recently, again that felt like an opportunity to tell a more nuanced story. To try to paint a psychological and an emotional map of the NHS, which was an institution which I felt had been ridden roughshod over for many years. In some ways we had forgotten as a society where it had come from, and what it had been born from.
More recently, you’re absolutely right, across several projects, across opera and TV drama and a novel, the climate crisis has occupied my mind. And as I said, this brings risks with it. It’s much harder to make good art when you’re taken over by an urgent issue that you want to explore and excavate. So it has changed me, and it IS changing me, and I’m still finding my way through that change. At times I take a step back and say, well, what would I write if I wasn’t going and looking for other people’s stories? What is my story? Maybe it’s also a response to your own life, and settling down to a certain extent, and you’re having to go elsewhere to find things of more interest? But I don’t think that’s necessarily true: you want to people these issues with people and with experience, and if you haven’t had that experience yourself there’s an instinct to go out and find it.
CHITRA
It’s impossible to unpick which parts of it come from the stage of life in which you’re at, and also the world in which we live. It’s all threaded together; there’s no need to unpick it, and it would be impossible.
OWEN
Although, it is interesting. The more you look at the climate crisis the more you realise that, as a species, it is a n on-going failure of narrative. We know what we’re doing, we know what we should do and what we can do to avert it, but people who want to tell a different story, or postpone it for a few decades and kick it down the road a bit – they have won the narrative. And that’s where I am fascinated. What is the role of storytellers and filmmakers and theatre? I think we have a huge part to play there.
CHITRA
The word that makes me think of is ‘responsibility’.
OWEN
Yeah, but it’s also a massive artistic challenge. That’s why it’s the very best of our storytellers who need to take it on, because in many ways you are going against the grain of governments and individuals. That’s what it so interesting about this present moment, in that it’s brought the idea of change and different ways of being, the idea of holding on to some of the aspects of this moment, and it’s made the conversation more alive and more possible.
CHITRA
That seems like a very hopeful springboard to take us into your list. So these are 10 writers that you have selected. It’s really interesting the umbrella term, this notion of 10 writers who are ‘asking the questions that might shape the future’. In a way it’s such a slipper term, I found it very hard to hold onto. I kept having to return to it, and think ‘what are they trying to do again?’ Because really, it’s the responsibility of all writers to do that, and yet when you really delve into this list and spend some time with it I just found all sorts of really interesting and subtle commonalities between them.
They seem together, as a collective, to speak to the moment in which we’re living. I keep coming back to the present, because this is a list for now and now, the present, is that it’s doing very strange things to our concept of time. Bending it and elongating it in all sorts of ways, because the past and the future have become very painful and difficult and frightening places to go. So we have this present that these writers are working in, yet they have to and you have to, and we all have to, find ways in which we can ask questions of the future at the same time. It’s a really interesting paradox, because writing is a slow business.
I wondered if we could begin, before we go through the writers one by one, if you could say something about the group. What you feel they maybe have in common.
OWEN
You’re right, it is something of a slippery term. Of course, what we hope of all literature and all writers is that their works ask questions and ask questions of us. But I suppose what I was drawn towards in these writers – and, as I said, this list was born in that idea, that question of how do you capture and render an aspect of activism and still make good art? It’s very hard to do.
I was looking for a certain kind of question. Questions that have that sense of urgency, about the now. How that questioning happens. That’s about craft and skill, about how the questions are posed within the works.
As a group, yes, when you first look at them they look incredibly diverse – many forms, many styles, many aspects of perspective and experience. But what I was first struck by was their ability to make connections; to look through the established norms. It’s a phrase I’ve used already in this conversation: to join the dots, to acknowledge and address and explore more nuanced narratives around questions of identity, belonging, heritage.
And of course, part of doing that, although these are very much writers of now, looking into the near future, all of them, I think, have a really extraordinary understanding of the past. Both on a very, very personal level in quite a few cases, but also on that level of cultures and nations. There’s a real, incredibly active conversation in these works between the apst – who we have been, what we have done – and who we are. Those are the components that ask the question: who shall we be?
I think it’s impossible to read this selection of writers and not ask these questions. Who have we been? What have we done? Where are we going? Something that came through, more evident in some of the writers like Raymond Antrobus and Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, and perhaps Hannah Lavery, is ideas of belonging. How those ideas are braided between place and ancestry. But actually it’s something that comes through in nearly all of the works in various ways. I’m really interest in that: the importance of acknowledging how vital and crucial to individuals, to societies, belonging is, but also how unless those stories of belonging are told in their entirety – and not in a selective or easy way – then they can be quite dangerous.
At the end of Alys Conran’s novel Dignity, she talks about how the other side of belonging can become an exclusion zone; how a home can become a fortress. That’s something else that connects these writers. And the third part, and again you could argue that this is something you’d ask for any writers, is a quality of attention and attention to the present moment, which I think allows those connections to really come to the fore in their work.
All of this, for me, comes together to address and pose the question: we are about to go through, we’ve probably started already, a massive repositioning of who we are to each other, and even more crucially who we are in relation to nature and the planet, our home. I think it’s that question of how are we going to reposition ourselves that comes through in a lot of this work. That’s everything from Laura Bates addressing sexism, addressing still the greatest human rights crime on this planet, the mistreatment of women and girls at the hands of men, to someone like Elizabeth-Jane Burnett who is going right down, into the soil, and saying ‘look, we have to acknowledge what we’ve done to the soil, and in the long run what will happen to us because of what we’ve done to it.’
I’m not sure that’s given you a coherent overview entirely, but this was the territory that these voices and these writers were speaking into for me. When you read them as a whole it just made those possibilities of who we might be in the decades to come feel very alive in the mind.
CHITRA
That’s a fantastic summing up of the list. I’ve got questions fizzing and popping all over the place now. Perhaps it would be good to take the writers one-by-one, and as we talk about them individually we can talk about them together as well.
Let’s begin with Martin MacInnes, who seems to me such a brilliantly globalised writer. This idea of place, which is so present in your own work, place as both a kind of integral, our ancestry, but also as a springboard to the world. We’re living in a completely globalised time now. Martin is very influenced by Clarice Lispector but very much comes from the Highlands of Scotland as well.
OWEN
You’ve put your finger on it. Initially a lot of these works are on quite an intimate scale in terms of place. That interplay between the local and the global, that’s one of the most pressing questions. How do we keep the best of internationalism, but perhaps do away with some of the worst of global capitalism?
In Gathering Evidence, Martin’s new book, I just thought he plays with that sense of interconnectedness on this global level, across questions of extinction and data collection, with such ludic skillfulness, but a really unsettling structure and voice, so actually his characters are very much knocked out of place and are adrift in this global environment in which you feel a sense that there’s a search for a sense of belonging, in each other, and through these other means – be it through the investigation of a species which is about to become extinct, or through thinking about what we can capture about each other through the most intimate data collection.
I just loved how he wove those two apparently very disparate worlds together in his two main characters. We are living in the sixth great extinction, and that’s one of the driving plotlines in this book. Then, alongside that we have John, who is a programmer who – and I don’t want to give too much away, because that’s something else that Martin MacInnes does very well, which is that you feel that there’s a detective novel under this book as well, part of it’s internal workings.
CHITRA
There’s a real playfulness of form and subject matter.
OWEN
Absolutely. In terms of that form, the opening of the book reveals to us that in my beginning is my end, if that’s not too much of a clue, and then to watch the journey towards that through this interconnection through these apparently disparate worlds of nature conservation and data apps felt incredibly inventive, and goes back to what I said earlier. He found a wonderfully novelistic way of rendering these issues which we know are very, very contemporary and we know are going to define who we are in the future. The degredation of the natural world, the growth of AI, our increasing reliance on algorithm, data collection, how much of us we give away and how much of ourselves we see in what we give away in the online and the virtual world.
So he’s really here because, yes, you can investigate that in documentary, in reportage, in academic books, but there’s a reason why we still turn to novels: because they can do things those other forms can’t. He’s pulled off something quite extraordinary, in managing to create a really great novel out of those materials.
CHITRA
I’m just thinking as you’re talking, Owen, that he’s doing something so clever in terms of speaking to how disparate everything seems at the moment, yet also the connectedness of it all. He’s saying something about how our brains now work, with all of the data that’s constantly being fed into them. Even the simply act of scrolling through a social media feed, you are just jumping from here to there to everywhere, all the time. That’s a really interesting space to explore in a novelistic sense.
OWEN
And also, of course, this really interesting interplay between individuality and the easure of the personal and the unique, as well. This app that the central character creates, Nest, which obviously is the single word that most obviously joins these two narratives – his partner is off investigating the nests of these chimpanzees, and this whole idea of a nest, our home, on that intimate local level and on that global level.
But this app, it thrives on our completely individual movements. Second by second by second. And yet as people become more and more immersed in this representation of themselves, they lose more and more of themselves. I thought that was a really beautiful and lyrical description of what’s happened over the last 10 years in terms of our relationship with our virtual selves.
CHITRA
Absolutely. You used a word there, ‘erasure’, which I feel is a good place to move on to your second writer. This is in no particular order, this list, it’s just the order in which I happen to have written them down.
The next one is Raymond Antrobus, and I feel like his response to erasure of all sorts of cultures and communities, is so creative and so playful and so moving. When you read one of his poems you read them from the gut. He’s one of the most exciting poets and performance artists around today.
OWEN
He really is. It’s fascinating, as there are quite a few poets like this around at the moment, but he’s one of the best examples of where he’s brought with him elements of that performance world onto the page so successfully, which is why they work so well on the page as well. He’s an incredibly moving poet, with these quite fearless, accessible but incredibly skillful poems.
You’re right, his collection The Perseverance is absolutely people with stories and voices that in various ways just haven’t been heard, or have been silenced, or have been kept in very specific spaces of the general consciousness. That’s why he’s in this list, because if we’re going to move forward in anything like a healthier way than we have done in the last 40, 50 years we have to get better and more comfortable with the multiple, and with the different.
I suppose this comes to the fore most obviously with his poems around deafness, and being deaf himself, and the deaf experience, but also around his own heritage or being Jamaican and British. I’m sure we’ll be returning to this a few times in this list, but it’s the way that he keeps that double-scale of the personal heritage and the societal heritage, constantly in place throughout the poems.
Just as I said Martin MacInnes did something that only the novel can do, Raymond has taken those elements of activism, because that’s what’s in the DNA of these poems, and has imbued them with so much empathy and emotion and such an acute sense of language that he’s done something that only poetry can do.
CHITRA
Another very strong thread running through these writers is the notion of writing as activism, or an act of resistance. We’ve got a few writers here, Raymond Antrobus being a very good example, but also the likes of Adam Weymouth or Laura Bates or Elizabeth-Jane Burnett – writers are are not just politically-driven, or writing from a particular political viewpoint, but that their writing is actually like a form of direct action.
OWEN
You’ve really touched upon something there. Potentially previous generations of writers would kind of separate the political writing and the life writing, but the political, with a small p and a capital P, I’d say, comes to us so much more naturally braided into these works. That’s what I was looking for, what I was asking for, for it to live within these works in a much more organic way that, for me at least, never feels overtly forced but is handled with a lambent touch.
CHITRA
Organic – another word to ease us onto the next writer, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett. What a fascinating book The Grassling is! It’s memoir, it’s biography, it’s a kind of dictionary of the soil. At one point she’s rolling around in the fields and it turns almost into a piece of performance poetry. Tell us about her inclusion on the list.
OWEN
Well, The Grassling just blew me away, because it’s such an extraordinary book. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like it. It keeps evolving and morphing under your hands. You think you’ve got one thing, then you’ve got something else. You think, yes OK, I’ve got a naturalist’s diary, an excavation of physical place, geographical place, also heritage, her mixed Kenyan-British heritage, and she keeps returning to this one field that has been in her father’s family for generations, in Devon. I was fascinated by that, because in a book we’ll talk about later, Dignity, the characters talk about the idea of ‘square mile’, or a Bengali word and a Welsh word both referring to that unique place that is your habitat. That’s something that Elizabeth-Jane Burnett is doing here.
It’s the depth to which she goes. As you say, she goes deeper and deep into the soil, until you’re in a world of relationship which is not just her and her father and his parents before him, or her and her immediate nature, it is us and this element that enables us to be, which we have in some instances treated so badly. I think I am paraphrasing, but there is a line that sang through to me, where she more-or-less says “we should be kind to the soil if we are to be kind to ourselves.”
CHITRA
There is that idea of the soil containing somehow all of history. As you go down into it, you’re delving into the past. Such as fascinating idea, at both a physical and a metaphorical level. There’s something about Elizabeth-Jane Burnett and a lot of these new nature writers, who are claiming this form for themselves that has traditionally been a form written really by the white, middle-class establishment, and usually men as well. The thought of Elizabeth-Jane Burnett rolling around in the fields of Devon is so pleasing.
OWEN
It really is. That sense of fresh eyes coming to a subject and therefore making us see again. You feel it all the way through these works: an insistence that actually it’s not enough for this knowledge of the natural world to be held by certain academics, or naturalists. Every single one of us needs to have a 101, basic, ground-level education and awareness of the ecological systems that keep us alive. It needs to be as naturally part of us as breathing, which is what I took away from this book. What I found really exciting was how much more we as a society, as a species, have to learn about the place that we live.
It’s also really refreshing, and we see this again and again in this selection, to have ideas of identity not just rubbing up against – in terms of Britain – south-eastern England and the urban areas, but also the rural areas. In Scotland, in Wales, up against other ideas of identity that have sometimes formed themselves in relation to the mainstream, or the norm.
CHITRA
The list really reflects that. It really shows that this is a list of writers from all over the UK. In this particular moment in time, when you’re seeing increasingly that we have a Prime Minister who in some ways just seems to be governing England now…
OWEN
Yes, that’s been extraordinary.
CHITRA
Just how fractured the country really is. We already knew this, obviously, post-Brexit, but coronavirus is just putting a magnifying glass onto it. It seems so important that all your writers are from very specific parts of the country and it’s such a diverse list.
The reason I bring up Brexit, of course, is that Garrett Carr is a map-maker. His book sees him walking what we have been calling ‘the back-stop’, this border that is contested and redrawn. Tell us a bit about him.
OWEN
I heard about this book and I guess I was drawn towards it because of the times that we live in. He walks the border, right when it’s about to become, or has become the front line between Britain and the EU. It is suddenly invested with a whole other level of importance and significance and story. On one level it’s a travelogue as you would expect – it starts at the start, it ends at the end – but the journey he takes us on, into the idea of borders, and how that shifts and changes…he starts with various, almost jokes around the border, and you see the idea of invented borders and arbitrary borders as these strange follies that cause such strife and a sense of division, and then as he continues on that journey the joke at various points becomes deadly serious.
At a time with so much popular nationalism on the rise across the globe, borders being spoken about so much, obviously now with none of us crossing them but before the current crisis whole swathes of the global population unable to cross borders, and then others skitting across the globe, flying through borders with great ease. That incredible inequality of movement is crystallised by him into the clarity of a single border.
It’s one of the most pressing questions going forward: are we going to continue to allow these borders to identify us, and to shape us, to the extent that we have? Or might we move somewhere towards and environment where it’s the more porous ideas of cultures that concern us, rather than these impervious borders which are increasingly defining us at the moment? It’s a great example of what literature can do; to take us on the physical journey and, on that journey, take us on so many other pathways into the idea and the concept and the history of borders.
CHITRA
And he’s a really good example of a writer, and there are many of them on this list, who manages to do something so prescient and ask the right questions at the right time – or even before the right time! This notion of asking the questions that will somehow shape the future is key, isn’t it? For a writer to both see the times in which we live – see what the border means right now – but also understand what the border might mean down the line. Especially within the covid-19 pandemic, that idea from climate scientists that in some ways we did this to ourselves. Going forward, how we might live within borders and go beyond them – when we’re allowed to again.
It makes me think of the refugee crisis and how that’s impacted by greater isolationism.
OWEN
Again, it does ask such prescient questions of the climate crisis.The climate crisis does not acknowledge borders. That’s the big one.
CHITRA
Neither does the pandemic.
OWEN
Neither does the pandemic. There’s going to be increased movement of people and are we really going to try and stick with this incredibly rigid mentality and ideas of borders and nations? Obviously that has been the initial, instinctive response of so many societies, but how sustainable is that? That’s really one of the questions that Garrett’s book asks.
CHITRA
Let’s go on to your next writer, Alys Conran. You’ve already mentioned Dignity a couple of times. She’s an absolutely fascinating novelist. I believe her debut was amongst the first books to be published simultaneously in Welsh and English. Tell us a little bit about her work.
OWEN
That was interesting. Pigeon, her first novel, was published simultaneously, and she’s a genuinely bilingual writer. We should acknowledge that more of the world is bilingual than not, something we’re not very good at in Britain. That brings a different tension to a language and how language works.
She’s in this list actually because of her second novel, Dignity, which is just a wonderfully crafted novel. Beautifully written. I was so impressed by her characterisation, and I guess this is a book which is answering that core, that question I had, which is how do you take issues, how do you take political ideas, and really render them and make them human and humane? Alys does this in terms of Britain dealing with its colonial past in India, multiracialism, outside of the urban centres, in a coastal town in Wales, and with this extraordinary friendship between this very old woman, Magda, who has a past in the Raj, and her carer, Susheela.
It’s a fantastic novel. Right at the start of this conversation we talked about key works, and how often do we hear their voices? I’d say not much. But in this novel we get a real insight into that world. It’s a book which moves very consciously towards different possible futures and it does so through addressing pasts, past trauma, and that interconnectedness. These two apparently very, very different characters, and then as their stories are woven together you see the shared territory, discover the similarities.
Maybe this is a sleight of hand, but I was also looking for writers who I think are attuned to the moment. She has the right kind of skill as a novelist to write about the moment in such a way to keep asking those pressing questions. It’s a novel that did what you hope the best novels will do: I came up from its pages thinking about things differently, seeing things differently.
CHITRA
She’s a brilliant example of this hoary old question that’s really preoccupying literature at the moment, around identity politics and who gets to write what. She’s an example that anyone can write anything, as long as you do it with vast amounts of respect and empathy and thought and compassion.
OWEN
Yes, exactly. Like lots of people, I’ve always been concerned and worried about that conversation around cultural appropriation, because I’m worried that if you follow one line of thought, where do you end? That only certain people can write certain things? And I think it comes back to that primary duty of a writer, which is that if you are going to write outside of your own cultural orbit, then you’d just better make sure that you do it really well, and with respect and with the required research. And that you’ve got the toolbox to pull it off.
CHITRA
Completely agree with you. That constant process of self-questioning that a writer should be doing, that’s incumbent on the act of writing in itself, to always question why you’re doing something. That goes back to the idea of the role and function of the writer.
OWEN
Actually, there was a moment of symbolism towards the end which I rather like that also spoke towards this repositioning of humanity to nature. When Shusheela and various others are involved in doing up Magda’s house again, and giving it a sense of rebirth, and they’re looking at this structured lawn that hasn’t coped and looks awful, and the question is how do you take this into the future? The answer is that it becomes a wild flower meadow.
You lose those structures of the past, and you go boldly into a different kind of future.
CHITRA
Moving on to Nikita Lalwani. A fascinating novelist. In some ways a very classic, traditional, brilliant novelist who is just writing stonking, brilliant, clever page-turners. Tell us about her last novel, You People.
OWEN
That’s the book that really made me want to put her on this list. We were talking about immigration earlier, and we were talking about the idea of the writer being counterflow to those anonymising forces, those blunted, broad narratives that we might receive through other media. There are quite a few books at the moment being written about the refugee crisis and immigration and there are many, many good books, but gosh – this is one that really brings it into such living, human detail, with great humour and tenderness and excitement.
For me, it’s also a book about kindness. About how to be kind. And, god, is there any more pressing question to take us into the future than ‘how can we be kinder?’ How can we not be so worried and so scared of ‘the other’? But actually accept that there is going to be movement of people, there needs to be movement of people – our actions have brought this about – so how can we create an environment where this can happen in a humane way?
So yeah, it’s very much a metropolitan novel, a London novel. There’s a hugely diverse set of characters meeting in this sort of safe house of a pizza restaurant. The stories of the people in the kitchen and the waitresses and the owners and how their stories interact with that central narrative of belonging and place: what happens when there is a rupture and you’re taken out of those places? Or you take yourself out of them? Where else can you find that sense of belonging?
There’s nothing wrong with a stonking, great, traditional novel that really does everything that you ask of it. But for me it was the humanity that it placed upon the question of immigration that really earned its place on this list, because that’s an issue that isn’t going anywhere and we need to find new ways of thinking about it.
CHITRA
You’re right, she’s a real solid example of the idea that there’s all sorts of ways to be political in your writing. She does it through compassion, which is a real novelist’s skill, to enter the psychology of your character and treat everyone with absolute humanity.
OWEN
It’s a great example as well, and I’m aware that we might be repeating ourselves somewhat but hopefully that’s a sign of coherence through the selection, but it is a great example of where all those issues that I mentioned at the start, they’re so lightly worn. What you’ve got here is a novel that keeps you turning the pages, because you care about the plots and you’re excited to see what happens next.
If we’re going to make narrative progress with some of these subjects that we’re talking about, that’s how it will be done. By taking people on the story, first and foremost.
CHITRA
A nice segue into Hannah Lavery, who is based in Scotland and her performance poetry monologue The Drift has made a big splash up here, for good reason. It’s an absolutely beautiful work and in some ways she shares something in common with Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, that sense of beginning from a place of family, to talk in much broader strokes about the nation.
OWEN
I was told about The Drift by friends in Scotland, so I got hold of the pamphlet Finding Seaglass: Poems from the Drift. I’d never read her work before and it was just so incredibly vital and energetic and immediate. And again, she shares something with Raymond Antrobus, very successfully bringing that performance heritage onto the page.
As you quite rightly say, braiding the personal and societal. it was just very interesting for me to see questions of heritage and identity in the context of Scotland, and of a Scottish identity. Not in that traditional axis of London or south-eastern English. She plays that territory with real boldness as well. I love the inclusion of the spoken voice in her poems, be that her children, and how those little snatches of dialogue speak into the broader concerns of the collection.
Asking questions about identity. Who we’ve been. And what does that mean about where we go? And I think further complicating the conversation about who we are, and what our heritage means. And that goes back to what I was saying about Raymond’s work, because we all need to get so much better about having that conversation in a more nuanced way.
I thought it was great work that felt urgent and very much of the moment.
CHITRA
Clare Pollard, your next writer, has that voice which just comes at you fully formed. Particularly in poetry, which she shares with Hannah Lavery, they just kind of come at you and get you by the craw, from the page, don’t they? Clare Pollard has been doing that for a long time. There’s something so arresting about her poems.
OWEN
Absolute authenticity of voice. I think in poetry it’s one of the hardest things to pull off. Authenticity is a very slipper term. We hear it when it isn’t authentic. You said earlier that writing is a slow business, and it is, but you also mentioned the idea of writers being prescient. For me, Clare is always a few years ahead of the game. She was writing personal poems that tackled the climate crisis and rendered it in a very personal environment ten years ago! Especially in her book Changeling.
I’ve just opened a poem at random here: “I watched Edward Snowden tapping at his laptop in a hotel, a t-shirt over his head, all his blood set ringing by a fire alarm test.” She’s a very contemporary poet who in the broadest sense of the word I think has always written poems that are fuelled by a sense of protest, or a sense of an insistency in acknowledging and seeing the cracks and the faultlines in our contemporary existence.
Finding the beauty in those cracks is where poems are born. There’s a fierce love of humanity in her work and it’s both that ferocity and that love which makes it sing for me. She’s always been contemporary and always looking down the line. If you want to know where we’re going to be in a few years time, what questions we’re going to be asking, I usually turn to one of Clare’s books.
CHITRA
If you want a comment on where we are today, just read a Clare Pollard collection from five years ago.
OWEN
Absolutely! As someone who has spent far too much time in soft play, she pulls off fantastic poem about soft play. Those for me are the poets to really look for: the people who find poems in places which, once it’s been found, you think – oh yeah, of course! But until you read that poem you’d have never seen it there.
CHITRA
I must look that up as a fellow loatherer of soft play. That’s the only thing about soft play that I want to read.
OWEN
I thoroughly recommend it. Might not make you want to go back ever again.
CHITRA
It’s interesting, because Clare Pollard, when you read about her work, she’s often described as a very confessional poet, but I think what often happens when we talk about women poets is that we fail to see how political they also are. She strikes me as a deeply political poet, who has something to say about this late moment in capitalism, and that spirit of the times, that is deeply political.
OWEN
That is what she does. She finds the politics in the personal, in a really, really moving way. You get a sense that she’s pissed off, but I like that. I really like that. There is an anger and a rage there, but she’s very attuned to the beautiful and the lyrical.
CHITRA
It’s the anger of someone who cares, isn’t it?
OWEN
You come back to that idea of a fierce love. Quite often I give people her books, because they haven’t heard of them and I’m never quite sure why. I’ve never had anyone come back and say that her work didn’t speak to them.
CHITRA
And what more can a writer ask for than that? Adam Weymouth, Owen. Let’s talk about him, because he’s another example of somebody whose work cannot be separated from his activism. He was a climate change campaigner in his twenties, before he became a writer.
OWEN
It’s all of that background that sends him on this extraordinary journey up the Alaskan river, the Yukon, following the king salmon. First and foremost I should just say that I think it’s fantastic writing. He meets a multiple of characters and his pen portraits of them are incredibly successful.
But we talked about the climate crisis being partly a consequence of a failure of narrative, and here’s a written journey that I think really addresses that. It’s the way he weaves the connections between the human and the natural, and again and again pointing out that we do this, and this happens. While at the same time, there’s a point where he says that connections are hard to prove. He acknowledges some of the abiguity, but it’s the relationships that he paints between salmon in the river – and, god, I’ve learned a lot about salmon. What an extraordinary fish! – and the people on the banks. In that one, singular journey, for me he speaks to the wider relationship between man and the natural world, and what’s gone wrong and where it could go right.
CHITRA
Something that Garrett Carr does as well, walking the Irish border, is that quality of close attention. Looking at something small, very very closely, and see the entire world in it. It’s that perspective that we really need right now.
OWEN
It’s interesting, isn’t it, because with all of us being sent into our homes, into our close orbits, are perhaps having more of that experience ourselves. You’re right, it does come down to that attention to detail, but then it comes down to the ability to convey it in such a way that people will listen, and will see those connections.
CHITRA
Last but not least, Laura Bates, who most people would know as a feminist campaigner. A real stalwart of the scene, somebody who with her Everyday Sexism project has given a complete game-changer. But she also recently wrote a YA novel.
OWEN
That’s right. A novel called The Burning. That’s why she’s on this list. In terms of activism, Laura is the most overt activist out of all these writers, and her writing in that field has been incredibly powerful. I’ve watched audiences absolutely feel empowered and able to grasp the subjects of sexism and inequality through Laura’s writing, and she really has become an important voice of a generation.
In terms of the important questions she’s asking, as I said earlier one of if not the most – well, I suppose we can’t really rank these questions, but certainly one of the most crucial questions and one of the areas where we can definitely improve as a species is the mistreatment of women and girls at the hands of men. But then, and this has brought us full circle to a writer being a conduit for other voices, she’s taken all those conversations she’s had with teenage girls when she’s done her talks and activism events, and she’s found a shape for them, a literary shape, in this novel The Burning that runs parallel with this historical narrative of a witch hunt and the contemporary version of a witch hunt through sexting and shaming and slut shaming and bullying.
I thought it is a great example of what we’ve been talking about: how do you take those issues that burn within you, about which you have great knowledge, and find a story to give them shape, which speaks to different people in different ways? In The Burning she’s really achieved that, in an ingenious way.
CHITRA
And it really ties in, Owen, with what you’ve been saying about this idea of connecting past and present. I believe that novel takes the ideas of the 21st century witch hunt and the 17th century one and synthesises them. These are writers who breathe this idea of asking the questions that will in some way shape the future. I know you explore a lot in your own work, that we cannot do that without continuing to excavate the past.
OWEN
That’s what all of these writers do. Talk about asking questions – they ask some tougher questions of the past, and say “no, actually, the narratives we receive as broader narratives, that isn’t good enough.”
It’s going to sound obvious, but our futures are born out of our presents and our pasts, which is what makes this present moment so interesting. That’s something which we might discuss in the classroom, or in literary circles, but now we’re talking about it as a society. How this moment is harnessed, how it is captured, is absolutely key. That’s what Laura does in The Burning, it’s what all these writers do. They take a fresh look into the past, with that ability to see those connections, with that special kind of nuanced attention.
It’s all of that that forms the questions in their books, which certainly for me means that you lift your head from the page and you can’t help but look into the future.
CHITRA
I just want to thank you for this list, Owen, because there are some moments of real despair in lockdown, aren’t there? It’s a real rollercoaster of one minute feeling deep gratitude for your immediate circumstances, and the next minute you’re horrified. I feel grateful that you’ve gifted us such a lovely, diverse and hopeful list of writers.
OWEN
You’re the first person that I’ve been able to have a full conversation about these writers that I’ve been holding close for the last few weeks, so thank you so much.
CHITRA
We should probably finish there. I don’t know about you, but as I said I’m sitting in a room and the door is barricaded by a bag of overflowing laundry. I can hear the dog whining outside.
OWEN
I can hear my kids whining, so I think they all need to be addressed!
CHITRA
Thank you so much for your time.