The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction longlist 2020

One of my favourite writers that I read during my time at university was George Orwell. I have a special fondness for his fiction such as “Keep the Aspidistra Flying” and “A Clergyman’s Daughter” (in addition, of course, to the famous “1984”) and nonfiction such as “Down and Out in Paris and London”. So it’s wonderful that The Orwell Foundation runs a series of prizes for new books which seek “to make political writing into an art” including an award for political fiction. Last year’s winner was Anna Burns for “Milkman” which is a sharp-eyed look at the personal impact of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Other novels I was especially glad to see on last year’s shortlist include “Ironopolis” by Glen James Brown, “Sabrina” by Nick Drnaso and “Red Clocks” by Leni Zumas.

The longlist for this year’s prize has just been announced and includes an intriguing mixture of fiction I’ve read, a few I’ve been meaning to get to and some books I’ve not come across before. Some of these novels such as “The Topeka School” by Ben Lerner, “Spring” by Ali Smith and “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead have been critically lauded but received little or no prize attention before this award. So it’s great to see a book prize shine a spotlight on them and noting the political message of these books in particular. Four of these novels also appeared on last year’s Booker Prize longlist including “Ducks, Newburyport” by Lucy Ellman (which was the best book I read last year), “Girl, Woman, Other” by Bernardine Evaristo, “The Wall” by John Lanchester and “The Man Who Saw Everything” by Deborah Levy. Iconic writer Edna O’Brien’s novel “Girl” is also listed for this year’s Women’s Prize.

Other books on the list I’m keen to read include “This Paradise” by Ruby Cowling which is a collection of short stories about people fleeing towards places or times or situations they hope might be better. “Broken Jaw” by Minoli Salgado, the other book of short stories on the list, includes tales mostly set in Sri Lanka that concern the traumas of war. Regina Porter is an award-winning playwright and her debut novel “The Travelers” concerns the histories of two interconnected American families (one white, one black). Attica Locke is an acclaimed author of literary crime novels and “Heaven, My Home” is the second instalment in her Highway 59 series. James Meek’s “To Calais, In Ordinary Time” is a historical novel set in the 14th century amidst the shadow of the Black Death.  

So it’s a wonderfully varied list and I look forward to discovering some good new fiction from it. The shortlist will be announced mid-May and the winner will be announced on June 25th, George Orwell’s birthday. Let me know if you’re rooting for any of these books or if you’re keen to read any of them now.

My Top 10 Books of 2019

It’s been an eventful year for books. Some of the biggest literary releases of the year took the form of sequels such as “Find Me”, “Olive, Again” and “The Testaments”. Atwood’s novel was also controversially awarded this year’s Booker Prize alongside Bernardine Evaristo magnificent “Girl, Woman, Other”. Thankfully other book prizes stuck to awarding one winner. Lucy Ellmann’s “Ducks, Newburyport” didn’t make it past the shortlist of the Booker but it did win this year’s Goldsmith’s Prize. The Women’s Prize for Fiction was awarded to Tayari Jones’ “An American Marriage”. Jokha Alharthi, an author from Oman, won this year’s Booker International Prize for her brilliant novel “Celestial Bodies”. The Wellcome Book Prize was awarded to “Murmur” by Will Eaves. The Wainwright Book Prize for Nature Writing was awarded to Robert Macfarlane’s “Underland”. The Desmond Elliott Prize was awarded to Claire Adam’s “Golden Child”. Excellent writers Danielle McLaughlin and David Chariandy were amongst the recipients of this year’s Windham Campbell Prizes. It’s also been a significant year for poetry as Raymond Antrobus’ “The Perseverance” won both the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Winners of The BAMB Readers Awards included Madeline Miller’s “Circe” for Fiction, Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” for Non-Fiction and the late great Leonard Cohen’s “The Flame” for Poetry. We also lost a number of great authors this year with the deaths of Toni Morrison, Jade Sharma, Kevin Killian, Andrea Camilleri, Deborah Orr, Clive James, Andrea Levy and Rachel Ingalls.

Personally, I’ve read many great books this year. There have been a number of powerful memoirs including “Kill the Black One First” and “My Past is a Foreign Country” and some excellent new poetry including “Surge” and “Deaf Republic”. But here are ten highlights which I think are truly exceptional. If you’ve read any of these books I’d love to know your thoughts as well as some of the best books you’ve read this year. You can also watch a video of me discussing my ten favourites here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9SVanX5kO0

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

This novel may be more famous for its page count than the contents of its story, but I think it’s utterly immersive. The story is almost catered for me as it discusses a lot about baking and old movies (two passionate interests of mine) but it’s also a brilliant take on our current times, our current state of mind, our current uncertainties and fears, our current tendency to rely on rumour and assumptions over facts and all of this is filtered through the unrelenting perspective of one Ohio housewife. I found it hypnotic, hilarious and unlike anything I’ve ever read before while also having the feel of great classics like Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses. I think it’s ingenious and like I said in a video I made recently about my favourite books of the decade I think it will be a future classic.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

One of the difficulties about having political discussions concerning racial minorities and minority communities in Britain is it lumps huge groups of distinct individuals into one category (and that’s something which occurs in a lot of rhetoric from political pundits). So it’s really meaningful and effective how Evaristo creates stories of many different black women to present the complexities of many different points of view and ways of living. But this novel isn’t just about making this larger statement. More importantly, it’s great enthralling storytelling that had be gripped and flipping through the novel to fully understand all the connections and ways these women’s lives touch upon each other. It’s a very creative way of telling the story of a community of people who both support each other and sometimes tear each other down.

My Life as a Rat by Joyce Carol Oates

I think one of the most terrifyingly tragic things that anyone can face is to be rejected from their own family. In this story an adolescent girl witnesses her brothers committing a racist attack and testifies to that fact. This is seen as a betrayal and so she’s thrown out of the only life she knows. One of Oates’ greatest themes is the instinct for survival. And it’s heartrending how the girl at the centre of this story persists and continues while still hoping to be welcomed back into her home. But it’s really a novel about the tough choices all of us have to face when negotiating whether to remain loyal to those we depend upon or stay true to what we know is right. And the way Oates presents the psychological complexities of this is so impactful.

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

This novel looks at another side of racial injustice where a young man is falsely accused of a crime and taken to a juvenile reformatory in Florida. There he experiences the horrendous way young men (most of whom are black) are being abused and killed and where the larger community either ignores this is happening or takes a complicit role in their exploitation. It’s so impactful how Whitehead composes this story and presents the way whole histories and communities of people can be made to disappear. And I’m one of this novel’s many fans who feel like it’s an injustice this book hasn’t won any awards yet.

You Will Be Safe Here by Damian Barr

This is another novel which unearths hidden histories. Before reading this novel I didn’t realise that during the Second Boer Wars in the early 1900s, the British military set up and ran concentration camps in South Africa. These camps were purportedly for their inhabitants’ safety but really they were a slow form of torture and a political tactic to steer the war. The story follows a mother who is taken to such a camp, but it’s a dual narrative as the second half of the book goes over a century into the future where a teenage boy is taken to another kind of camp which is meant to make a “real man” out of him through torturous practices. So this novel is about how certain institutions can appear to be for people’s benefit, but really physically and psychologically destroy them. I know this all sounds very weighty and difficult, but you’re just made aware of these things in the background and it’s what I’ve thought about since finishing the book. But the immediate story is about the warmth and endearing characteristics of its central protagonists and that’s what makes this novel an enjoyable read as well as a moving one.

Constellations by Sinead Gleeson

This is a book of autobiographical essays which follow the trajectory of Sinead’s life through illness, marriage, motherhood and work as a journalist. And while she goes into some very personal subject matter it also gives a perspective on social and political transformations in Ireland over the course of a generation. I love this book because the writing is so beautiful and smart while not being self-important. And she does this by referencing many different artists and writers but only in instances where they have deep personal meaning for her and the subject matter of her life. It’s an evocation of an entire culture as well as a hard-fought life.

The Years by Annie Ernaux

This book does something quite similar to the above but concerns a very different place (as it’s set in France instead of Ireland.) This is my first time reading Ernaux’s writing and I was utterly blown away how she can write such specific details about a life that simultaneously evoke an entire culture and time period. She does this by using the collective “we” when describing events and transformations over a half-century of French life. But you’re also aware of events in the life of the individual protagonist that this narrative is filtered through who goes through significant events like having children and getting a divorce. Reading this was a revelation to me as it’s so unique and extraordinary.

This Brutal House by Niven Govinden

Another very unique way of telling a story and presenting a culture is what Govinden does in this novel. It shows drag culture in NYC by representing the voices of different queens who sometimes speak in a collective voice, the police force they sometimes clash against and the individual story of Teddy, a child of one of these houses. It’s a beautiful evocation of how drag is both funny and playful as well as being a political act and a way of creating non-traditional families. And he really meaningfully shows the complications and in-fighting within this community as well as its strong bonds.

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor

This novel takes the concept of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando where a character changes back and forth between a man and a woman – but in the form of a 23 year old college student in 1993. However, in some crucial ways Paul really differs from Orlando and even self-consciously states at one point that’s not who he is. Even though he can physical change back and forth between being a man and woman, there’s a central core to his character which is constant. I found him to be really endearing and fun, but the story also shows how he’s a very flawed individual that makes assumptions about other people based on their appearance just as assumptions are made about him based on how he fashions his own physical appearance. It’s really brilliant and it’s such a sexy sexy novel.

Underland by Robert Macfarlane

This is a nonfiction personal account of Macfarlane’s journey through many different subterranean landscapes from natural caves to mining operations to underground scientific research centres to the bottoms of glaciers. It’s a way of looking at a different part of the planet which we’re usually unaware of but which shapes our environment and is a repository of both geological and human history. I found it a really liberating way of breaking out of my own circumscribed view of the world which normally consists of walking between work and home. And the writing is so beautifully poetic, touching upon many reference points and making a larger statement about where our humanity is headed.

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

It’s startling to realise how much human suffering can be conveniently ignored by the general population when governmental institutions neatly shield this injustice away. Colson Whitehead’s new novel centres around the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory in Florida in the early 1960s. It was purportedly to school and train these teenagers to become “honorable and honest men” but in reality it abused, exploited and (sometimes) killed them. While the civil rights movement was valiantly working to end segregation the boys in this institution were still divided into white and black dormitories. Unsurprisingly, the white inmates were given better food and supplies as well as less labour and better treatment. Whitehead tells the story of this barbaric facility by focusing on the lives of several inmates – most notably an intelligent young man named Elwood who finds himself imprisoned there after he was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like many people I found Whitehead’s previous novel “The Underground Railroad” incredibly moving. This new novel is stylistically different but just as impactful. Not only does it tell a harrowing tale of racism and institutional abuse, but has a gripping plot with a surprising and moving ending.

One of the most heartrending things about this novel is that Whitehead based it on a real institution called the Dozier School for Boys. After this school closed down an anthropological survey in 2012 discovered the remains of dozens of bodies outside the cemetery grounds. Whitehead fictionizes the back stories of several boys who might have ended up in these unmarked graves while also depicting the atmosphere of the civil rights movement at that time. Elwood is a studious young man who aspires to go to college, but finds himself drawn into the protests after being inspired by a record of Dr Martin Luther King’s speeches and his teacher Mr Hill who was a former freedom rider. Through Elwood’s perspective we experience all the conflicted feelings of people had to choose between looking after their own self-interest or joining to fight for a bigger cause. Of course, when he realizes how inhibited his life would be given the current social systems it leaves him little choice because “It didn’t make no sense until it made the only sense.”

It’s incredibly moving how Whitehead depicts Elwood’s good intentions and his stalwart belief based off from Dr King’s words that if he maintains his integrity and diligently works for progress things will change for the better. But this is severely tested when Elwood finds himself locked in the Nickel Academy where there is no reason or justice – only an obtuse system where severe and entirely unjustified punishment can be randomly enacted. He observes “Problem was, even if you avoided trouble, trouble might reach out and snatch you anyway.” The institution is riddled with corruption and incompetence from the administration to the guards to the medical staff. The place is given a lick of paint and congenial veneer whenever any state inspection is due. There’s a sense that over many decades the abuse and prejudice has become so systematic no one in a position of power even thinks to question it.

Dozier School for Boys

This is extended further when Elwood and another boy are loaned out to the local population to perform unpaid work as well as deliver governmental supplies to local businesses which were intended to feed, clothe, educate and entertain the incarcerated boys. It meant civilians and businesses outside the institution directly benefited from the maltreatment and suffering of these young black men. In this way Whitehead’s novel makes me question in what ways ordinary people are complacent in the exploitation of others. It’s also a poignant reminder of how brutally people suffered during segregation in America which is something which should be obvious but as one character notes it is “hard to remember sometimes how bad it used to be.” But outside of these larger issues, this is novel which vividly and skilfully tells the stories of several characters trapped in a brutal system in a way which is rousing and memorable.