The Booker Prize Short List – Ben Markovits

This is the fifth of six posts in which we examine the six writers shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, with the winner to be announced on Monday, 10 November.

The Architecture of Quiet Confidence: Analysing the Craft of Ben Markovits

Ben Markovits’ twelfth novel, The Rest of Our Lives, shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, celebrated not only a career milestone but also highlighted his accurate and disciplined writing style.

For writers committed to the craft, Markovits exemplifies how restraint, sincerity, and the skilful conversion of personal history can create deep social and psychological realism. His work is subtle and humble, reaching excellence not with showy displays but through careful precision. This technique guides the reader not to the facts of a plot, but to the edges of emotional truth.

Ben Markovits’s fiction is rooted in a unique blend of global experience, academic rigour, and unexpected professional exposure. His background plays a key role in developing the dual perspective — simultaneously intimate and detached — that characterises his social critique.

Born in California, Markovits experienced a diverse upbringing across Texas, London, and Berlin. This early contact with different cultures gave him a vital transatlantic sensibility, enabling him to see both American ambition and European restraint from an insider/outsider viewpoint. Through studies at Yale University, followed by postgraduate work at the University of Oxford, this blend of an American educational background and a strict European academic structure equipped him to critically analyse contemporary culture without jumping to easy conclusions. Today, he lives in London, where he teaches Creative Writing and Practice-based Research as a Professor in English at Royal Holloway, University of London, continually refining his analytical and teaching abilities.

Beyond academia, Markovits brought a distinctive professional background to his work. Before his current role, he worked as a high school English teacher and served as the editor of a left-wing culture magazine. Most unusually, he played professional basketball in Landshut, Germany, competing in the southern league of the German second division.

This period of disciplined, physical labour in a non-literary field was not merely a biographical footnote; it served as the foundational material for his 2010 novel, Playing Days. The willingness to turn personal experience, even something as physically specific as professional sports, into nuanced fiction shows a consistent belief that life, in all its forms, is valid subject matter. This blend of American education, the grit of professional sport, a European intellectual base, and an eventually acquired English sensibility positions Markovits perfectly to portray the emotional and cultural disillusionment of the contemporary global middle class.

The Evolving Architecture of Markovits’s Works

Markovits is a prolific novelist, with The Rest of Our Lives being his twelfth novel, and his bibliography is characterised by an elegant movement across genres, indicating an author committed to discovering the most suitable structural framework for his current thematic concerns.

An ambitious project marked his early career: the Byron Trilogy. This series established him as a master of literary history and metafiction, using biographical material to explore complex questions of identity, history, and narrative reliability. The trilogy began with Imposture (2007), which focused on John Polidori, Byron’s doctor. He followed this with A Quiet Adjustment (2008), which centred on the events leading to Annabella Milbanke becoming Lady Byron. The final volume, Childish Loves (2011), advanced cross-genre experimentation by featuring Byron as a narrator while blending biographical reconstruction with an alleged, possibly false, autobiography of Markovits.

This period of formal play extended to Playing Days (2010), a book advertised as a novel but that closely resembles a memoir, providing an accurate account of his brief professional basketball career. The key lesson for writers here is the power of cross-genre sincerity: Markovits demonstrated a willingness to breach the structural boundaries of fiction and memoir to achieve a deeper emotional or sociological truth. This trait would become characteristic of his later works.

In the mid-2010s, Markovits shifted markedly towards contemporary social critique, reaching a peak with his James Tait Black Prize-winning novel, You Don’t Have To Live Like This (2015). This work directly addresses the deep-rooted issues confronting the United States in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The protagonist, Greg Marnier, is a quintessential Markovits figure: an academic with degrees from Yale and Oxford, ultimately disillusioned and intellectually powerless. Marnier engages in a regeneration project in Detroit’s abandoned neighbourhoods, vividly exposing the racial and class tensions worsened by gentrification. The novel captures the experience of an over-privileged generation that finds itself working harder than desired, earning less, and living somewhere they would rather not. This work established Markovits as a prominent voice for the anxiety and disillusionment felt by the educated, middle-class Western world, a theme he continued to explore in novels such as A Weekend in New York, Christmas in Austin, Home Games, and The Sidekick.

The Philosophy of Restraint: Technique and Prose Style

Markovits is often praised as an engaging, sophisticated, and accomplished author, yet his mastery is characterised by what he deliberately avoids. Markovits dismisses overt literary techniques. He does not need to showcase his talent with an elaborate plot, exaggerated speech, or style. His prose is characterised by profound quietness and self-effacement, a quality that critics have rightly identified as a sign of genuine confidence in a storyteller. This restraint is not just aesthetic; it is philosophical.

His technique has been described as literature that writes to the margins. Markovits is less interested in a concrete, fact-rich narrative than in guiding the reader towards the unsaid: the edges of consciousness and emotional truth through an allusive, richly suggestive prose. By moving away from declarative, point-to-point storytelling, he compels the reader to engage with the narrative’s psychological and emotional implications, lending it a sincerity. The drama lies in the nuance of human behaviour, allowing the narrative to explore bigger themes through the smallest aspects of human conduct, such as mortality, sickness, and love.

Influences on the Quiet Style

Markovits’s literary vision, which enables him to attain this exact quietness, is influenced by a hybrid range of influences.

He cites John Updike’s Rabbit series as a significant inspiration, admiring the portrayal of American society over 30 or 40 years, documenting a nation’s socio-cultural changes. He also draws on the psychological depth of Alice Munro and the domestic realism of Anne Tyler, writers whose work aligns with his keen interest in capturing the emotional texture of everyday life.

This hybridisation is crucial to his success: he explores broad, sweeping themes of the American novel (the road trip, the national chronicle) but presents them using the intimate, psychologically sharp techniques of the domestic novel, filtered through his developed English sensibility. This dual allegiance enables him to record cultural decline with exceptional accuracy.

The Craft of The Rest of Our Lives

The Rest of Our Lives represents the culmination of this stylistic and thematic development, employing a classic American narrative form — the road trip — to explore the quiet catastrophe of middle-age transition.

Yet, the novel offers a twist on the classic American road novel. The protagonist, Tom Layward, begins his journey immediately after dropping off his daughter, Miriam, at university, where she plans to experience the college experience. Instead of returning to his life, Tom keeps driving, deliberately escaping a collapsing marriage and the fatigue of waging culture war.

Unlike the traditional road novel, which promises a limitless future and self-discovery, Tom’s journey is directed backwards, serving as a record of his past. He follows a vague route to visit significant people: an old university friend, his ex-girlfriend, his brother, and his 24-year-old graduate son, Michael. His final, symbolic destination is possibly his father’s grave in California.

For the writer, this structure is a clever device: the physical movement of the road trip creates psychological stillness and reflection. The flight from ideological conflict (culture war battles) implies that the external, public definitions of meaning have broken down, forcing the protagonist to seek definition solely in the private, fixed landscape of his personal history. The road trip becomes a means of reconciling with fixed regrets and examining a life in decline.

Themes of Sincerity, Mortality, and Transition

The central theme is the heartfelt journey of middle age and the inevitable bittersweet changes as children leave home. Markovits confirmed that his inspiration was grounded in his own experience as a parent watching his children grow up, driven by the wish to capture a particular period of family life coming to an end.

The Booker judges praised the book for being perfectly pitched, quietly exhilarating and moving, focusing intensely on family, marriage, and those moments that may come to define us. The writing’s precision, recognised by critics as sincere and accurate, allows the domestic structure to explore larger themes, such as mortality, sickness, and love.

The Radical Act of Autofictional Sincerity

What elevates The Rest of Our Lives into a masterclass is the distinctive and compelling connection between the author’s personal life and the protagonist’s fictional decline.

Early in the writing process, the narrator, Tom, began developing undiagnosed symptoms of illness. Markovits deliberately chose to incorporate this fictional decline into the narrative, viewing it as a symbolic representation of what occurs in middle age—the gradual decline you cannot quite understand. However, the symbolic aspect became literal and profound. By the time the author finished the first draft of the novel, he had realised that both he and his narrator, Tom, had gained clarity about their respective symptoms. In a rare act of shared vulnerability, Markovits disclosed that he himself was undergoing chemotherapy.

This literal mirroring of the author’s declining health with the protagonist’s existential journey guarantees that the novel’s engagement with mortality feels immediate, structurally assured, and genuinely authentic. This dedication to radical sincerity elevates the book beyond mere fictional reflection, establishing the intense emotional weight and precision that underpin its critical acclaim.

Markovits offers a glimpse into his modest, steady creative process. The novel began, in his usual way, with a single seed: an idea for the opening line. He then wrote the first page and set it aside, only returning to the project when the emotional drive — the desire to write about the end of a period of family life — became overwhelming.

Regarding his routine, he keeps a regular schedule, working at a desk placed in a corner of his sitting room, aiming to write mostly from breakfast until lunch. His only mentioned tool for this process is the computer. This practical, consistent method shows that the depth of his literary work is supported by a modest but disciplined routine, demonstrating that literary mastery often needs only a small space and a steady schedule.

The shortlisting of The Rest of Our Lives confirms Ben Markovits’s status as a significant contemporary literary voice. The judges praised the shortlisted authors as being fully in command of their own use of English, their unique rhythm, and their expertise, having crafted a novel that no one else could have written. This statement affirms the singularity of Markovits’s style and his distinctive ability to draw on his background, his developing craft, and his radical commitment to sincerity.

Markovits is a writer who moves through several liminal spaces at once: an American academic with an English sensibility, a writer of formal literary history who also embraces autofiction, and a master of the subtle style exploring themes of profound existential importance. Through a restrained and precise style, he captures both the collapse of utopian visions and the painful closeness of personal decline.

His legacy will be characterised by his consistent ability to blend structural experimentation with deep emotional authenticity, culminating in the sincere engagement with middle age and mortality seen in The Rest of Our Lives. He offers a powerful lesson: literary weight is often best conveyed not through shouting but through the confident structure of quiet truth.

The Booker Prize Short List – Kiran Desai

This is the fourth of six posts in which we examine the six writers shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, with the winner to be announced on Monday, 10 November.

The Long Game: Kiran Desai’s Craft, Lineage, and Epic Endeavour

As the daughter of the celebrated author Anita Desai, Kiran Desai inherited a literary lineage, yet she has forged a distinctive path entirely her own. Her writing career is defined not by speed but by depth, culminating in the publication of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a novel that is published nearly two decades after her Booker Prize-winning second book The Inheritance of Loss (2005/2006). This latest work — a sprawling, 688-page epic — is not merely a tale of love and displacement but a philosophical treatise on modern alienation, cementing her reputation as one of the most ambitious and technically accomplished novelists of her generation.

Her three published novels — Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), The Inheritance of Loss (2005/2006), and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (2025) — do not simply address the postcolonial condition; they map its progressive psychological consequences, moving from the internal absurdities of a small Indian town to the structural isolation felt across a hyper-connected, yet fundamentally fragmented, world.

Kiran Desai’s biographical details are crucial to understanding the breadth and texture of her fiction. Born in New Delhi, India, in 1971, her life quickly established a transnational trajectory. She lived in India until the age of 15, moving then to England, before settling as a permanent resident in the United States, all while retaining her citizenship of India. This migratory existence, spanning three continents and multiple cultural codes, gave her the cosmopolitan outlook and dual cultural perspective that defines her work. She writes from the informed, complex position of an insider who is simultaneously an outsider, capable of observing both the minute details of an Indian household and the crushing anonymity of a New York City borough.

Her commitment to her craft is reflected in her rigorous academic training. Desai pursued creative writing at Bennington College, graduating in 1993, and subsequently earned two Master of Fine Arts degrees: one from Hollins University and another from Columbia University. This intensive, disciplined study provided the technical foundation for her acclaimed literary style. Early recognition arrived when her work was featured in The New Yorker and in Salman Rushdie’s influential 1997 anthology of Indian writing, Mirrorwork.

The Shadow and Light of Literary Lineage

The most famous element of Desai’s biography is her relationship with her mother, Anita Desai, a important writer in Indian English literature. Anita Desai is renowned for shifting the focus of the Indian novel from broad social-political narratives to the intense, internal landscape of the individual, particularly exploring the psychological depth and personal conflicts of women within the often rigid structures of post-independence Indian society.

Kiran Desai’s work enters into a profound dialogue with this inheritance. While her mother delved into the psychological constraints of traditional settings, Kiran Desai expands this investigation onto the global stage. Her themes broaden to include the impact of globalisation, cultural displacement, and mass migration on identity. Where Anita Desai might explore the stifled life of a woman in Delhi, Kiran Desai maps that same sense of suffocation onto the pressures and promises of the postcolonial world. This intergenerational influence is not a burden, but a sophisticated literary launching pad, allowing the younger Desai to chart the contemporary consequences of the psychological history her mother pioneered. Her novels, therefore, carry the weight of tradition while fiercely charting the neuroses of the modern age.

Desai’s oeuvre, though composed of only three novels over more than two decades, represents a significant contribution to global literature, marked by an astonishing versatility of style and a sharp, evolving thematic focus.

Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998)

Desai’s debut novel established her mastery of comic satire and introduced her early engagement with the tension between tradition and modernity. The novel tells the delirious tale of Sampath Chawla, a young man seeking to escape the responsibilities of adult life and the lethargy of Indian society. He ultimately climbs a guava tree on his family’s property, achieving unexpected fame as a reluctant holy man or ‘godman’.

The technique here is rooted in magic realism and humour, which Desai uses to critique societal norms, the absurdity of hero-worship, and the inefficiency of officials. The return of multinational brands, such as Coca-Cola, to India is allegorically used to symbolise the cultural and ecological disruptions caused by global corporate influence in the Global South. By presenting a cast of foolish characters and a protagonist who finds freedom in literally climbing away from his life, Desai highlights the unnecessary constraints imposed by society and uses satire to expose hypocrisy and human folly.

The Inheritance of Loss (2005/2006)

The second novel marked a profound shift towards socio-cultural realism, providing a searing, politically acute examination of globalisation and colonial legacy that resonated worldwide, winning the Man Booker Prize in 2006.

Set partially in the mountainous region of Kalimpong, India, the novel contrasts the lives of characters caught between two worlds. The narrative primarily follows Sai, an anglicised orphan living with her maternal grandfather, Judge Jemubhai Patel, and Biju, the cook’s son, who is an illegal immigrant in the United States.

The novel’s thematic power lies in its examination of inherited humiliation and self-hatred. Judge Patel, a retired colonial-era judge, disdains Indian ways, even eating traditional Indian bread with a knife and fork, having internalised the colonial preference for English manners. Yet, despite his Anglophilic tendencies, he was never truly accepted by the British, leaving him perpetually adrift. Biju’s narrative, meanwhile, charts the disillusionment of chasing the American dream, where he faces racial prejudice, deplorable living conditions, and the harsh realities of global capitalism, ultimately leading him back home.

The Inheritance of Loss effectively argues that globalisation does not offer liberation but rather perpetuates the oppressive legacy of colonialism through economic disparity and cultural displacement. The ‘loss’ referred to in the title is multi-layered: the loss of identity, the loss of cultural heritage, and the loss of dignity for those caught in the unforgiving current of global migration.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (2025)

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a narrative tour de force that tackles the psychological and societal repercussions of mature globalisation. The novel takes place largely between 1996 and 2002, and at 688 pages, its length reflects its epic scope and ambition.

The novel is a sweeping tale that intricately combines three forms: a traditional love story, a multi-generational family saga, and a rich philosophical novel of ideas. Its structure is ambitious, featuring a huge cast of friends, older relatives, and minor characters, including the cooks, maids, and drivers whose interwoven stories reflect and inform the central romance.

The core narrative revolves around Sonia and Sunny, two young Indian immigrants navigating life and ambition in the United States. They first encounter each other by chance on an overnight train in India. This serendipitous meeting occurs only after their respective families — acting through a clumsy, old-fashioned meddling — had attempted to arrange a match, an effort that only served to drive them apart. The plot thus sets up the thematic tension between fate, the weight of family expectation, and the protagonists’ yearning for self-determined desire and genuine connection.

The protagonists are defined by their internal struggles with ambition, displacement, and the search for belonging in a world that constantly categorises them.

Sonia, an aspiring novelist, returns to India after studying in the snowy mountains of Vermont. Her psychological state is complicated by her relationship with Ilan de Toorjen Foss, a charismatic yet narcissistic artist whose influence has cast a dark spell on her life. This relationship serves as a deep dive into the psychological cost of seeking inspiration and intimacy in unstable environments, with Ilan’s narcissism being linked to his own inherited emotional deficiencies. Desai uses Sonia’s journey to create a complex portrait of an artist as a young woman, focusing on the trauma and psychological confusion that can result from predatory intimacy.

Sunny, a struggling journalist, has resettled in Brooklyn from Delhi. His motivation is largely one of escape, fleeing the suffocating control of his imperious mother, Babita, and the unresolved conflicts of his warring clan. Sunny’s professional ambitions are drawn from classic American writers, but he faces the frustrations of journalistic life, including being labelled an outsider pretending to be an insider after a difficult interview. By focusing on a journalist, the novel inherently explores how media consumption and global capitalism affect identity, particularly how the news morphs from country to country as it travels.

Babita, Sunny’s widowed mother, is central to the exploration of the mother-son bond, representing the parent who cares too much and whose fear of loneliness drives her son further away. Conversely, Ilan’s mother’s profound neglect led to his own psychological abuse of others, showing how inherited emotional deficits perpetuate cycles of damage. The protagonists are thus constrained by heavy, complicated bonds that link their generation to the preceding one, forcing them to actively struggle against family neuroses to define their own happiness.

The narrative structure emerged slowly. The plot detailing the eventual collision of Sonia and Sunny’s paths was developed much later, as Desai initially wrote separate stories for a multitude of characters until their inevitable intersection became clear. This character-driven, sprawling approach resulted in the manuscript reaching a staggering 5,000 pages at one point, necessitating years of painstaking shaping and editing to find the final, cohesive structure. Desai likened this exhaustive process to swimming, sensing the mysterious shape of the novel, like a hidden presence beneath the surface, that she could feel but not yet fully visualise. She found structural metaphors in other literature, such as Franz Kafka’s obscured castle in The Castle, seeing it as a perfect parallel for the uncertainty and eventual revelation inherent in the long, arduous journey of writing a novel.

Meticulous Detail and Artistic Precision

Desai’s method relies heavily on meticulous observation and precise material accumulation. She consistently keeps diaries to capture transient material, including accurate details of the landscape and snatches of conversation as they happen, arguing that these are difficult to recreate from memory alone.

This dedication to detail grounds her narrative in an authentic sense of place. All locales — from New York City neighbourhoods and Delhi to Venice and a fishing village in Colima, Mexico — are places Desai knows intimately. The precision extends to minute domestic objects, such as a reused squash bottle and coasters featuring botanical illustrations of tulips, which are intentionally included to establish the exact mood of prosperous, contemporary Indian households. This level of granular detail elevates the setting beyond mere backdrop; it becomes a signifier of class, cultural aspiration, and global interconnectedness.

Furthermore, Desai deliberately incorporated her personal influences into character development, finding inspiration in her own life. For example, Sonia’s elderly aunt was somewhat based on a cherished aunt whom Desai described as a Truman Capote-like character. She also explored her curiosity surrounding her German grandmother, who migrated to India in the 1920s and died when Desai was a baby, using the not knowing as a springboard for character exploration, such as Sonia’s German grandfather.

The critical consensus on Desai’s writing technique is one of consummate fluency and high literary craftsmanship. Her prose is praised for its lyrical quality, vivid imagery, and an exceptional ability to transition seamlessly between emotional registers.

The immense time span — nearly two decades — between The Inheritance of Loss and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is arguably the most defining element of Desai’s career. This gap was not borne of inactivity, but of a disciplined, meticulous creative process and the immense pressure following her early, spectacular success. The resulting novel needed to justify this long silence by being, as it was described by critics and judges, her most ambitious and accomplished work yet.

The creative process for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny was a two-decade-long endeavour defined by deep character immersion and a monumental accumulation of material. Desai reported feeling so close to her characters that she disappeared into their lives. This deep emotional and psychological commitment meant the novel was initially driven by a concept rather than a plot: a pressing desire to write a novel about global loneliness, which she perceived as being ubiquitous as water in the modern age.

In The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, the judges for the Booker Prize highlighted this technical integration, noting that the writing moves with consummate fluency between philosophical, comic, earnest, emotional, and uncanny modes. This synthesis is critical to the novel’s success, providing the narrative capacity to handle a vast scope that incorporates a love story, a family saga, and a complex novel of ideas. Desai expertly weaves together humour and pathos, allowing the emotional and political critique to resonate with profound depth. Her style is a polished form, inventive in its nuances, confirming her place as a major influence in Diasporic Indian English fiction.

The central intellectual project of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is to confront the many alienations of our modern world. The mobility and opportunity afforded to characters like Sonia and Sunny, far from offering liberation, often exacerbate their sense of isolation. The novel diagnoses the pervasive feeling of global loneliness as the inevitable, structural damage inflicted by a hyper-connected, yet intensely atomised, globalised society. The rifts of class, race, country, and history, the novel suggests, prevent genuine human connection even for those with economic privilege.

This profound thematic inquiry is channelled through the novel’s core love story. In a society defined by inequality and capitalism — one that attempts to categorise individuals into neat packages of consumable products — the act of choosing and committing oneself to love becomes the ultimate form of resistance. The love story between Sonia and Sunny is framed not as a gentle escape, but as a radical act. Their struggle for intimacy against the immense backdrop of societal trials is portrayed as a revolutionary reclaiming of humanity and individuality.

The quest for happiness in the novel is therefore an arduous, conscious struggle. It is the protagonists’ attempt to forge a form of radical normalcy and belonging in an intensely unequal, abnormal world, testing whether the intimate human bond can serve as an effective salve to loneliness against the overwhelming weight of inherited cultural baggage and powerful global forces.

Kiran Desai’s career, viewed in its entirety, demonstrates a sophisticated evolution in thematic engagement, establishing her as a crucial voice in contemporary global fiction. Her works are united by a superb command of language, narrative dexterity, and a profound engagement with socio-political realities.

Her thematic focus has progressed systematically:

Satirising Traditional Constraints (Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard): This early work focused on the localised absurdities of Indian society and the individual’s humorous search for freedom from domestic expectation, often using the unique lens of magic realism.
Mapping Colonial and Global Trauma (The Inheritance of Loss): This book shifted focus to the explicit, material wounds of colonial history and the economic brutality faced by migrants, chronicling the failure of the postcolonial dream.
Diagnosing Global Isolation (The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny): The latest work tackles the psychological fallout of mature globalisation — the universal condition of profound, structural loneliness — and posits intimate connection as a necessary, radical resistance to planetary alienation.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a crowning achievement that solidifies Desai’s reputation as one of her generation’s most significant novelists. The immense duration of its creation and its eventual scale and meticulous execution underscore its importance as a definitive artistic statement. Desai’s unique ability to weave vivid, multifaceted characters and complex family narratives across continents continues to yield deep insights into the psychological and collective struggles within the postcolonial framework.

Ultimately, Desai has moved from critiquing the geopolitical forces of empire to analysing the internal, psychological conditions fostered by modern capitalism and global mobility. Her conclusion is humanistic and powerful: while the economic and historical tides of globalisation are immense and isolating, the most profound act of resistance — and the path to belonging — is the deeply personal commitment to forging and sustaining human connection in a fractured world. Her work is a testament to the idea that the greatest creative statements often require not just talent, but the patient, exhaustive labour of many years.

The Booker Prize Short List – Katie Kitamura

This is the third of six posts in which we examine the six writers shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, with the winner to be announced on Monday, 10 November.

The Forensic Intellect: Inside the Craft and Contingency of Katie Kitamura

Katie Kitamura occupies a rare and pivotal position in contemporary literature, one where the exacting standards of the academy meet the psychological velocity of the literary thriller. Her work — characterised by its exquisite, dispassionate prose and narrators armed with a ‘forensic intelligence’ — does not merely tell stories of contemporary anxiety; it constructs a sophisticated apparatus for dissecting it. For writers seeking to understand how high-concept structure can elevate emotional material, Kitamura’s career, from her academic genesis to the global acclaim of her latest novel, Audition, offers a profound study in craft, control, and the necessary treachery of language.

I. The Authorial Architecture: From Ballerina to Booker Shortlist

To understand Kitamura’s distinctive style, one must first look at the unique trajectory that informs her intellectual architecture. Born in Sacramento, California, in 1979, and raised between the US and Japan, her foundational experience is one of cross-cultural displacement. This theme consistently informs the settings and psychological states of her protagonists. This early life provided a subtle yet persistent context of the ‘newly arrived’ — an outsider status that is strategically weaponised in her fiction.

Crucially, Kitamura’s initial artistic training was not literary at all; she trained as a ballerina. This background — rooted in extreme physical discipline, control, and the highly charged psychology of performance — offers a compelling subtext to her later fictional fixations on the disciplined body, the performance of self, and the intense mental space required by artistic rehearsal, themes that find their culmination in Audition.

Kitamura’s academic pedigree then overlaid this history of displacement and physical discipline with rigorous intellectual scaffolding. After graduating from Princeton University, she pursued advanced literary theory, earning an MRes and a PhD from the London Consortium. Her 2005 doctoral thesis, tellingly titled The Aesthetics of Vulgarity and the Modern American Novel, serves as a direct intellectual blueprint for her fiction.

This study was concerned with the classification and valuation of art — specifically, how high culture (aesthetics) interacts with low culture, raw human emotion, or uncontrolled reality (vulgarity). Her protagonists are frequently professionals engaged in interpretation — a legal interpreter, an actress, or an analyst — and are invariably tasked with decoding situations characterised by moral ambiguity, shocking violence, or chaotic emotional upheaval. Kitamura’s fictional method is thus the precise application of scholarly, detached analysis, the technique of the literary critic, to the realm of uncontrolled human experience. This professional engagement with decoding and valuation is not peripheral; it is the structural organising principle of her narratives.

This intellectual rigour is further compounded by her active career as a critic and journalist. Her essays and analysis have appeared in publications such as The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Guardian, and Frieze. This continuous professional engagement with interpretation — with judging the merits, meanings, and systems of art — ensures that the core concerns of her protagonists (authenticity, performance, and interpretation) are fundamentally and professionally understood by their creator.

II. The Published Works: A Progression of Precision

Kitamura’s published oeuvre charts a clear progression from early, critically acclaimed works focused on tightly controlled settings to international recognition for high-concept psychological narratives.

Her first published work, the non-fiction piece Japanese for Travellers: A Journey (2006), describes her travels across Japan and established an early interest in decoding place, cross-cultural dynamics, and the fault lines of identity and society. This groundwork set the stage for the displaced, hypersensitive narrators of her later novels.

Her novels include:

The Longshot (2009)
Gone to the Forest (2013)
A Separation (2017)
Intimacies (2021)
Audition (2025)

The initial reception of her first two novels was strong within the literary community; both The Longshot and Gone to the Forest were finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. However, the critical and commercial impact escalated dramatically with the publication of A Separation, confirming a maturation of her signature stylistic and thematic concerns that resonated with a broader international audience.

This success is validated by significant institutional support throughout her career, including the receipt of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Cullman Center Fellowship, alongside grants from the Lannan and Jan Michalski foundations.

The high cultural currency of her most recent work is undeniable:

Intimacies (2021): Named one of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021 and appearing on former President Barack Obama’s list of favourite books for the same year. It was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and won the Prix Littéraire Lucien Barrière in France.
Audition (2025): Shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize 2025 and again selected as one of Barack Obama’s Summer Reads for that year.

Her work is now translated into over twenty-five languages and is actively being adapted for film and television, confirming the high market value of her tightly structured, psychologically intense narratives.

III. The Signature Style: Dispassionate Prose and the Treachery of Language

Kitamura is frequently contextualised alongside other major contemporary writers, most notably Rachel Cusk and Elena Ferrante, and acknowledges the stylistic debt, particularly the use of the unnamed, highly reflective narrator and the coolly analytical register found in Cusk’s Outline trilogy. Yet, Kitamura’s particular genius is how she integrates this style with a specific, acute psychological purpose.

The defining characteristic of Kitamura’s recent fiction is the recurring use of the unnamed female narrator in A Separation, Intimacies, and Audition. This stylistic choice strategically minimises the importance of the protagonist’s personal history, forcing the narrative focus onto the process of interpretation itself. Critics consistently define the resulting stylistic register as possessing tremendously dispassionate prose and a coolly analytical style, which is employed precisely in situations fraught with emotional upheaval.

This detachment is not an aesthetic flourish; it is a psychological tool. Kitamura intentionally writes a female character who is unabashedly analytical and armed with a forensic intelligence. For the author, the narrator’s obsessive analysis is presented as a desperate attempt to regulate an existence that has proven to be hopelessly contingent. The analytical prose serves as a mechanism to regain control over a situation — be it a collapsing marriage or a politically fraught legal proceeding — that is rapidly slipping away. The tension in her novels, therefore, emerges less from plot twists and more from the gap between the narrator’s rigorous, intellectualised control and the chaotic, uncontrollable nature of the events they attempt to analyse. The act of writing, and the protagonists’ constant analysis, is framed as a kind of control, or at least the expression of a desire to control.

Precision, Power, and the Undefinable

Kitamura’s novels persistently explore abstract yet highly consequential ideas revolving around the inherent instability and corruptibility of language and its connection to social and personal power. She is fundamentally concerned with the hierarchy of language and the challenge of adequately articulating what is undefinable.

This focus is structurally embedded. The protagonist of Intimacies, for example, is a legal interpreter whose job is to translate testimony in war crimes proceedings at The Hague, making the corruptibility of language and its distribution of power a direct professional risk. The language Kitamura employs mirrors her protagonists’ defensive discipline: her prose is direct, deliberately staying clear of idioms and clichés, and meticulously avoiding assumptions of shared understanding. This precision is vital because the novels revolve around the failure of language to contain reality fully. By insisting on this meticulous clarity, she strives to articulate a theory on how to articulate what is undefinable.

Kitamura’s distinct contribution to the transnational movement of high-intellect female narrators is the professionalisation of interpretation. Whether the narrator is an analyst seeking a missing husband in Greece (A Separation), an interpreter navigating war crimes, or an actress preparing a role in New York (Audition), her protagonists actively function as professional conduits for, and judges of, others’ narratives. This highlights the inherent treachery of language not just as a personal failing, but as a formal, professional risk in the modern world.

IV. The Process of Creation: Slow Metabolism and Structural Control

For writers, perhaps the most revealing aspect of Kitamura’s craft is her approach to the writing process itself — a methodology built on resilience, patience, and the fusion of divergent structural influences.

Navigating Chaos and Returning to Practice

Kitamura rejects the romantic myth of the pristine writing routine, describing her own process as one that accommodates the inherent contingencies of mid-life. She famously states that she writes in a pile of books and papers and children’s toys and consciously chooses not to stop to notice the chaos. For her, being a writer is not defined by maintaining an ideal schedule, but by the resilience of returning to the work despite interruptions and gaps in time. She notes that so long as you return to your writing practice, that makes you a writer. Her advice to her students often revolves around accepting breaks in the writing process and the need to persevere.

Creatively, her process is characterised by patience — she is a slow metabolizer of ideas, often sitting with a core concept for five or six years before determining if it possesses the necessary endurance and urgency to form a novel. This prolonged period serves as a crucial test case for the idea’s viability before committing to the intensive labour of drafting. She views the later stages of writing as a transition from author to reader of your work, where the necessary detachment of an editor must be applied to the material. This measured pace stands in contrast to the high structural tension of her finished works.

The Ingenuity of Influence

The structural complexity of Kitamura’s novels derives from a synthesis of two unexpectedly divergent literary influences. On one hand, she acknowledges the pervasive influence of Agatha Christie, whose novels she read numerous times in her youth. She notes that Christie’s narratives maintain their power even when the solution is known, confirming the importance of the structure — the ingenious plotting and the tight mechanism of suspense — over simple surprise.

On the other hand, she cites the American social realists, particularly John Steinbeck and Theodore Dreiser, as essential teenage reading that taught her the power of the novel as a form of social critique. She admired their weightiness — the capacity to tell a broader social story through the intimate lens of a few characters.

The result is the signature form of the Kitamura novel: a text built with the tight, controlled structural precision of a mystery (derived from Christie), but which applies that architecture to moral ambiguity and philosophical meditation (derived from Dreiser’s concern for social justice). Her novels thus become literary thrillers that use the form of suspense not to resolve a crime, but to interrogate complex contemporary ethical and philosophical dilemmas.

The Architectural Strategy of Place

Kitamura employs a consistent structural template concerning setting that aligns directly with her own history of transnational movement. While her novels never revisit the same physical location, the mechanism of writing place repeats: the protagonist arrives at a single, contained, unfamiliar location (Greece, The Hague, the rehearsal space) that she must then interpret and decode.

This structural choice allows Kitamura to utilise what she terms the hypersensitivity of the newly arrived. Because the narrator is an outsider, she observes her environment with heightened sensory detail and intense interpretive focus, treating the unfamiliar city or location as a set of codes that must be cracked. This psychological state — hyper-attunement and displacement — mirrors the underlying emotional crisis, amplifying the tension between the protagonist’s need for certainty and the foreign, uncaring contingency of the outside world.

V. ***Audition*: The Climax of Performance and Paradox**

Audition (2025) is best understood not as a standalone text, but as the final and most formally ambitious text in the loose psychological thriller trilogy that began with A Separation and Intimacies. Kitamura structured these three books as a self-contained literary project examining language, external occupation, and performance, with all protagonists defined by roles that make them vessels for other people’s words.

Thematic Progression of the Trilogy

Novel	Narrator’s Profession/Role	Key Thematic Focus
A Separation (2017)	Separated Wife/Analyst	Control vs. Contingency; obsessive analysis as a mechanism for suppressing emotional chaos.
Intimacies (2021)	Interpreter for the International Court	Corruptibility of Language; The distribution of Power through Translation and the struggle to articulate the undefinable.
Audition (2025)	Actress/Performer	The Performance of Self; Authenticity vs. Artifice; Structural embedding of cognitive dissonance.

Narrative Mechanics and Formal Risk

Audition centres on an unnamed, ageing, accomplished actress who is preparing for a complex theatrical premiere while navigating the subtle, chilling collapse of her marriage to Tomas, an art critic. The psychological tension accelerates when she agrees to meet a young man, Xavier, who is nearly half her age. While the meeting initially carries a sexual charge, the narrator immediately denies this, stating the conflict reads as carnal interest, but the reality is much less easily imagined. The unsettling truth soon emerges: Xavier claims to be her long-lost son.

The novel operates on multiple, shifting levels of performance: the actress’s professional rehearsal, the performance of the crumbling marriage, and the manufactured drama initiated by Xavier. This focus allows Kitamura to explore the notion that there are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it.

The profound structural sophistication of Audition lies in its mandated cognitive dissonance. Kitamura stated that the starting point was a desire to write about how fundamental universal experiences, such as love or motherhood, can simultaneously feel like two mutually exclusive things. Rather than simply describing this contradiction, the book is designed to embed it structurally, requiring the reader to hold two separate versions of events in your head at the same time. It’s either/or, and also and. This formal risk creates a narrative that is both exhilarating and destabilising, persisting in the mind like a knot that feels tantalisingly close to coming free. Kitamura observes that as a culture, we are becoming quite bad at holding a contradiction in our heads, yet we live in a time of profound cognitive dissonance — a contradiction the novel forces the reader to inhabit.

Performance as Container

The thematic climax of Audition focuses on the core question of authenticity, especially for someone whose entire professional life is built on artifice. The narrator explores whether the purpose of performance is to create a container for dangerous, uncontrolled emotions. She muses that people do not want to explicitly experience violence or dread, but our awareness of the performance is what allows us to enjoy the emotion, to creep close to it.

The novel’s profound psychological inquiry asks: how close can one creep without experiencing it directly? If one continually constructs these performative spaces — performing one’s role as a wife, a partner, or a mother — the risk is that one becomes so deeply entrenched in such performance that the ability to experience reality authentically is fundamentally lost. Audition suggests that the artifice of performance, paradoxically, allows one to approach the trauma of reality without suffering its full consequences. Critical reception of the novel acknowledged the extraordinarily honed quality of its sentences and praised its acute focus on the psychological consequences of the loss of identity and the loosening of personhood, celebrating it as a literary performance of true uncanniness.

VI. Conclusion: Kitamura’s Enduring Contribution

Katie Kitamura has firmly established herself as a master of sophisticated contemporary fiction, developing a style of prose that is as precise as it is unsettling. Her literary significance resides in her ability to fuse the taut, structural control of the psychological thriller with profound philosophical inquiry. This synthesis is uniquely achieved by placing analytical protagonists — often professional interpreters or performers — at the centre of morally overwhelming, volatile situations, thereby making the act of interpretation the engine of the plot.

The trajectory of her work demonstrates a career-long intellectual project: the systematic critical evaluation of authenticity, emotional chaos, and the failure of language to fully contain reality. Her novels, especially the recent trilogy, function as sustained inquiries into the treachery of linguistic meaning and the relationship between narrative control and psychological survival.

For writers, Kitamura offers a powerful lesson: precision of style is not merely an aesthetic choice, but a narrative strategy. By making her narrators’ hyper-intellectualised processes the primary action of the novel, she elevates the genre of the literary thriller into a compelling meditation on cognitive dissonance and modern contingency. Her work provides an essential, rigorous lens through which to examine how contemporary individuals use analysis and performance to cope with a world that is fundamentally, irrevocably unstable. Her enduring contribution is the development of an acclaimed, signature style capable of articulating the essential truth of that instability.

The Booker Prize Short List – Susan Choi

This is the second of six posts in which we examine the six writers shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, with the winner to be announced on Monday, 10 November.

The Architecture of Memory: Susan Choi’s Flashlight

Susan Choi occupies a unique and significant position in contemporary Anglophone literature. Over the course of six major novels published across more than twenty-five years, she has evolved from a critically acclaimed literary novelist into a recognised canonical figure, a status underlined by a consistent stream of major literary honours, including the prestigious National Book Award for Fiction. Her novels are characterised by their intense psychological depth, combined with a vast historical and geopolitical scope, often placing intimate dramas against the backdrop of American political radicalism, academic isolation, and transnational identity.

Choi’s work is characterised by a profound intellectual tension: the simultaneous mastery and deliberate deconstruction of objective reality. Her professional grounding — having worked as a fact-checker for The New Yorker for a period — instilled a rigorous discipline focused on external verification and absolute factual specificity. Yet, her mature narrative strategy frequently employs structural unreliability and shifting perspectives, most famously in her National Book Award-winning work, Trust Exercise. This deliberate choice to dismantle narrative certainty, while possessing the organisational tools of journalistic truth, highlights the inherent instability of memory and the past when filtered through charged emotional or political contexts.

It is this rare versatility — the ability to move seamlessly between meticulous historical reconstruction, as displayed in American Woman, and high-concept meta-fiction, as championed in Trust Exercise and her new work, Flashlight — that secures her place as a writer uniquely suited to interrogating both objective historical ‘truth’ and subjective, remembered experience. Her literary project asks fundamental questions: where does the authority of truth ultimately reside, and how do we narrate the events that define our lives when the available perspectives are inherently limited and potentially self-serving? For writers, her oeuvre provides a masterclass in how to manage high structural risk with authorial control, prioritising the emotional truth over mere factual recounting.

Susan Choi was born in 1969 in South Bend, Indiana, and was raised there until the family moved to Houston, Texas. Her Korean father and Jewish mother instilled in her a cross-cultural background that profoundly informs her thematic preoccupations with identity, displacement, and the challenges of national belonging.

A formative, disruptive experience in her childhood — a trip to Japan — was so significant that Choi herself has described her personal narrative as falling into two distinct halves: ‘before and after Japan’. This period was followed by family disruption, her mother’s debilitating illness, financial struggle, and a lingering sense that the family had been afflicted by ‘some sort of curse’ while abroad. This personal history of geopolitical displacement and inexplicable consequence serves as a powerful, subterranean source for her fictional explorations of loss, mystery, and the long shadow of the past, particularly evident in the genesis of her latest novel.

Choi pursued a rigorous academic path, studying literature at Yale University for her Bachelor of Arts degree and later completing a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in writing at Cornell University. Her undergraduate years in the 1980s involved an intense study of literature and poststructuralist literary theory, which systematically questions fixed narratives and authority.

This theoretical scepticism was immediately followed by a period of intensely practical, fact-focused employment as a fact-checker for The New Yorker during the 1990s. This intellectual dynamic is crucial to understanding her creative output. She received training that systematically questioned fixed narratives, followed by journalistic work that mandated seeking and verifying objective facts. She noted that it was during this period of self-support while writing her first novel that she realised ‘what kind of writer’ she truly was. The tension between theoretical doubt (questioning who gets to tell the story) and journalistic rigour (knowing how to verify the facts) is the engine driving her unique narrative style, enabling her deep literary engagement with unreliable memory and the limitations of perspective.

The Literary Catalogue: A Progression of Themes

Choi’s novels are not merely a collection of works but represent a clear thematic and technical progression, characterised by a meticulous, multi-year process involving extensive research and structural revision between major publications. Her bibliography consists of six core novels and a picture book, each engaging with the ‘outsider’ archetype in increasingly sophisticated ways

Year	Title	Key Context and Themes
1998	The Foreign Student	Post-war narratives of displacement, following a Korean orphan survivor of the Korean War to 1950s America; explores identity, loneliness, and transformation. Awarded the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction.
2003	American Woman	Historical fiction focused on political radicalism, loosely based on the 1974 Patty Hearst kidnapping. Explores ideological disillusionment, fidelity, and surveillance within the militant left. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
2008	A Person of Interest	A literary thriller focused on academic paranoia and social isolation. Centres on a professor facing suspicion after a series of murders, examining media portrayal and the nature of outsider status. A finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
2013	My Education	A campus novel and coming-of-age story detailing a complex, intoxicating affair between a graduate student and the older wife of a charismatic professor. Awarded a Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction.
2019	Trust Exercise	A seminal work of metafiction set in an elite performing arts high school. Uses radical structural disruption to re-contextualise the past and challenge the authority of the narrative. Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.
2025	Flashlight	A sprawling geopolitical family drama and mystery tracing a father’s disappearance across Japan, the DPRK, and the US. Explores memory, language, and the multigenerational costs of historical consequence. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

The arc of these works shows an initial focus on external, historical forms of alienation — war trauma, political extremism — before shifting to internal, social alienation rooted in academic or relational paranoia. Her later works, Trust Exercise and Flashlight, then synthesise these concerns, powerfully demonstrating how massive, external historical forces generate profound internal, family-based isolation and trauma. The spacing between the novels, often five or six years, speaks to a deeply meticulous process essential for crafting narratives that ‘deftly criss-cross continents and decades’. Choi also expanded her catalogue with the publication of the children’s picture book, Camp Tiger, in 2019.

The Architecture of Style and Unreliability

Choi’s literary signature is her relentless exploration of identity, history, and memory as contested terrains. Her narratives consistently assert that attempts to ‘erase their past selves’ inevitably fail because ‘the past will not be past’. She plunges readers deep into the psychological landscapes of individuals caught between moral ambiguity and systemic alienation.

In her earlier career, her prose sometimes exhibited a tendency towards ‘straining for a really lyrical way of describing something’, a trait she later approached with critical distance.

By the time she wrote Trust Exercise, her style had undergone a conscious, noticeable shift. The prose became significantly ‘tighter’ and ‘more compressed’, driven by a desire for a ‘distilled efficient story-length pacing’, often associated with the short story form. She became less preoccupied with aspects of prose associated with overt style, such as ‘the beautiful metaphor or the perfectly apt physical description’. This evolution reflects a sophisticated literary agenda that prioritises narrative rigour and thematic urgency over ornamental language. The mature style is precise and demanding, eschewing meandering exposition for urgent emotional and structural disclosure, proving that stylistic sophistication can reside in compression and efficiency, not just lyrical flourish.

The core of Choi’s formal innovation, particularly in her later career, lies in her sophisticated deployment of the unreliable narrator and structural disruption, turning ambiguity into a tool for ethical and cultural critique.

Trust Exercise stands as the paradigmatic example of her structural daring. The novel begins with a seemingly conventional narrative of adolescent sexual and emotional awakening, only to introduce a dramatic structural break roughly halfway through. A second, entirely different narrative voice abruptly interrupts the initial account, presenting ‘her own truth about events we previously thought we understood’. This structural ‘violence’ forces the reader to confront their own assumptions, their ‘suspension of disbelief’, and the perceived ‘authority of the author’.

Choi has discussed this technique as an effort to take the reader on an experience of ‘doubt and surprise’ that is disruptive, yet ultimately contained within an ethical framework, ensuring she does not entirely ‘destroy that trust’. The emergence of the disputing voice, belonging to a previously minor character, is a powerful meta-fictional intervention demanding narrative autonomy. This voice’s self-proclamation — explicitly demanding self-definition — is an engagement with contemporary discourse concerning marginalised voices challenging established narratives of the past.

The implementation of narrative disruption in this manner is far more than a postmodern flourish; it is a calculated artistic response to the nature of contemporary political discourse, which she has characterised as a ‘war of political stories’. By structurally destabilising the fictional narrative and questioning the veracity of emotional accounts, she compels the reader to acknowledge the mechanisms by which seemingly ‘manipulative and fraudulent’ versions of reality gain attention and belief in public life. The successful execution of such meta-narrative complexities requires a specific level of artistic maturity, suggesting that the technical risk is expertly managed by an ‘experienced hand’ now comfortable with shifting the foundational ground of the story itself.

A further demonstration of Choi’s rigorous approach to thematic material is her subtle practice of reusing and re-contextualising intensely charged scenes across different novels. For instance, the titular ‘trust exercise’ in her 2019 novel — where blindfolded acting students engage in fraught, intimate contact — is a motif replicated almost identically in her earlier Pulitzer Prize finalist novel, American Woman. In both instances, the scene involves the same highly specific detail: a character being identified by a crush based on the physical ridges of their denim jeans. By recurring to this specific scenario, Choi explores the enduring themes of adolescent vulnerability, non-verbal communication, and the complex mechanics of identification and betrayal under conditions of imposed intimacy or blindness, demonstrating a thoughtful, recursive depth in her oeuvre.

Her research methodology often extends to finding deep, intertextual connections between seemingly disparate domains. For Trust Exercise, she explored the link between performance techniques and psychological manipulation. She discovered through her reading that certain Scientology practices were sourced directly from Sanford Meisner acting techniques. This discovery — that methods of psychological or artistic coercion cross cultural and institutional boundaries — provided the ‘dark uses’ she explored in the high school drama setting. This demonstrates a process of research that looks not merely for historical detail, but for surprising philosophical overlaps that can be leveraged to drive thematic critique.

The Writer’s Craft and Process

Choi’s writing process, while described as ‘always changing’ over the course of her long career, adheres to specific foundational principles that prioritise character and emotional consequence over abstract thematic plotting.

Choi generally begins a new project with a compelling situation or character, striving to generate the plot organically from that origin point. She maintains that starting with explicit thematic concerns tends to leave the writing ‘inert’, cautioning writers against abstract thematic plotting. The non-linearity evident in her most expansive work is often a strategic choice, a methodology specifically developed for approaching complex, trauma-laden narratives.

For instance, in contrast to previous works written in linear page order, Flashlight was written ‘in circles’ and described as ‘very nonlinear’. This approach was rooted in a deliberate ‘personal writing hack’: she chose to ‘dive into the story after all the bad stuff has happened’ and focus first on describing the consequences, delaying the exploration of the causes until later drafts. She has stated, ‘that’s where that story really came from, was this desire of mine just to get in there and try to describe the consequences. And then I thought later you can worry about how to describe the causes.’

This technique mirrors the psychological experience of trauma, where the immediate, disruptive emotional effects are prioritised, and clarity regarding the source only emerges through persistent, cyclical investigation. By prioritising consequence over cause and thematic framework, the narrative itself is permitted to dictate the terms of disclosure, granting the characters’ emotional states primacy and ensuring that geopolitical tragedy is not reduced to mechanistic plotting.

The historical and geopolitical scope of novels like American Woman and Flashlight demands meticulous research. The handling of geographically and chronologically sprawling narratives — such as the detailed chronological and political settings required for Flashlight (post-war Japan, Korean immigrant communities, DPRK repatriation efforts) — is arguably supported by her early professional discipline as a fact-checker. This background ensures that historical and geographical details, even minute ones, are meticulously handled, providing solid grounding for the high-stakes emotional and structural risks she takes. For Flashlight, the editorial process required extensive refinement of character backstories, establishing ‘historical grounding’, and detailing the geopolitical tensions, confirming the need for a deeply researched foundation beneath the fictional mystery.

Flashlight (2025) – Geopolitics and the Unsayable

Flashlight, Susan Choi’s sixth novel, represents an ambitious summation of her career-long thematic and formal interests, earning a prestigious shortlisting for the Booker Prize 2025. It successfully balances a vast geopolitical scope with an intimate portrait of familial loss, weaving together ‘historical tensions and intimate dramas with remarkable elegance’.

The novel originated from the short story of the same name, which itself stemmed from an earlier piece of creative non-fiction, ‘Some Japanese Ghosts’. The core inspiration was twofold: her own ‘disruptive’ childhood memory of a trip to Japan and historical accounts of ‘unexplained disappearances, in the late 1970s, of ordinary Japanese people’. While she initially intended the book to be a ‘lean, allusive, perhaps even fragmentary’ novella, it grew organically into her longest work, covering immense distances and time periods.

The novel’s geopolitical span is vast, stretching from a strawberry farm in Indiana to the North Korean border, and shifting between post-war Korean immigrant life in Japan, suburban America, and the North Korean regime. The story grapples directly with the lingering consequences of Japan’s colonisation of Korea (1910–1945) and the fate of the Zainichi Korean community in post-war Japan. The central crisis is therefore not a private event, but one driven by the unforgiving currents of twentieth-century history. The Booker judges recognised that the family is ‘swept up in the tides of 20th-century history’.

The narrative centres on the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Serk (also known as Seok or Hiroshi), a Korean émigré and academic, during a year-long academic secondment in a coastal Japanese town. The event begins when his ten-year-old daughter, Louisa, is found washed up on a beach following a walk with her father, who is then presumed drowned. This traumatic event shatters the small family unit.

The story opens with Louisa, a ‘tight little knot of fury’, evading and deflecting in a psychiatrist’s office, struggling to process her father’s loss and her mother’s subsequent invalid state. Her trauma is visceral; the consequence precedes any logical explanation. The novel then maps the hidden histories that led to this moment:

Serk: Born in 1940s Japan to Korean parents, Serk immigrated to the US for an academic position after his immediate family was tragically misled into repatriating to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) under the false promise of a ‘socialist paradise’. Serk’s disappearance during the Japan secondment is, in reality, linked to his clandestine goal of finding a pathway back for his family, illustrating how macro-political deceit can generate crushing micro-level catastrophe.
Anne: The American mother, Anne, also harbours significant secrets. She was a teenage mother who had secretly given up a baby, Tobias, before meeting Serk. She and Serk found a connection through a mutual sense of remoteness, as both sought to ‘erase their past selves’, yet neither could truly overcome their individual isolation. Anne’s decision to welcome Tobias back into her life further complicates the family’s environment of unstated truths.

Flashlight employs multiple character voices — including Louisa, Serk, Anne, Tobias, and Ji-Hoon. Unlike Trust Exercise, where shifts in voice violently challenge the integrity of the narrative, the multiple perspectives here are used to collectively map an enormous, unknowable event — Serk’s fate — from different points of view across different points in time and ideological displacement.

The novel is a powerful investigation into how the silence of what goes unsaid affects families, where the ‘negative space is a part of the picture’. It addresses the cruel research dimension involving Cold War-era geopolitical scams and ethnic diaspora politics, confirming Choi’s interest in ‘ordinary people facing extraordinary, often malevolent forces’. The novel’s success lies in its use of non-linear, expansive structures to cover immense historical periods and complex, intersecting identities, confirming a confidence in ambition and scope that cements Choi’s place as a major writer.

Susan Choi’s enduring contribution to contemporary literature is rooted in her unique synthesis of the intensely personal and the geopolitically vast. Her career demonstrates an evolving commitment to challenging the limits of narrative form and content, consistently exploring the weight of history and the fluidity of identity.

Her most significant formal achievement is the strategic deployment of narrative disruption, transforming the unreliable narrator from a conventional literary trope into a powerful device for cultural critique. This manoeuvre, perfected in Trust Exercise, prompts readers to examine the ethics of storytelling and consumption, forcing an active, questioning engagement with the text.In her culminating works, such as Flashlight, she successfully synthesises this structural complexity with the detailed historical immersion seen in earlier works. Choi’s literary practice showcases a rigorous, mature mastery of craft, evolving her style to achieve maximum thematic impact. For any writer seeking to understand how to leverage historical detail against the radical instability of personal perspective, the oeuvre of Susan Choi provides a meticulous and masterful masterclass. Her novels remind us that even as we strive for factual truth, the most compelling narratives often reside in the emotional fallout, the ambiguity, and the silences between the facts.

The Booker Prize Short List – David Szalay

This is the first of six posts in which we look in detail at the six writers shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, the winner to be announced on Monday, 10 November.

**Exploring Austerity and Exteriority: David Szalay, Flesh, and the Craft of the Modern European Novel**

David Szalay (born 1974) has solidified his position as one of the most structurally innovative and thematically resonant chroniclers of contemporary European existence. His work frequently centres on themes of isolation, economic precarity, and modern masculinity. For any writer seeking to understand how to approach vast, complex transnational subjects or how to wield stylistic austerity to profound emotional effect, Szalay’s career, particularly his 2025 novel Flesh, offers essential, challenging lessons.

Szalay’s critical stature is already impressive, having been named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2013 and appearing on The Telegraph’s list of the top 20 British writers under 40 in 2010. His debut novel, London and the South-East (2008), which drew partially on his early career experience in business-to-business telesales, won both the Betty Trask Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. However, his status as a prominent international literary figure was cemented by his sustained recognition from the Booker Prize Foundation. His 2016 work, All That Man Is, which explores European masculinity in crisis, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Following this success, his novel Flesh was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, confirming him as a twice-shortlisted author and affirming his influence in contemporary fiction.

The Framework of Transnational Identity

Szalay’s biography provides the foundational context for his thematic preoccupations with movement and geography. He was born in Montreal, Canada, the son of a Hungarian father and a Canadian mother. His family life involved continuous geographic relocation during his early years, including moving to Beirut and then to London after being forced to leave Lebanon due to the onset of the Lebanese Civil War. Although he grew up primarily in the UK and studied at the University of Oxford, he later resided in Brussels, Pécs, and Budapest, before finally settling in Vienna. This complex, continuous geographic movement makes it difficult to pin a fixed nationality on him, although he is often identified as having Hungarian and British roots.

This composite, shifting biography is far from anecdotal; it determines the essential framework for his writing career. His work focuses heavily on the movement of people and capital across the continent. His core literary interests are direct reflections of this complex transnational identity, revolving around topics such as the local effects of a globalising economy, the rewards and costs of intimacy, and the past and future of Europe. The novel Flesh, in particular, delves into the cultural and economic divides characteristic of an ever-globalising Europe, specifically detailing the journey of a Hungarian immigrant crossing the EU’s internal borders.

Structural Evolution: From Conventional Narrative to the Collage-Novel

Szalay’s literary output demonstrates a distinct evolution in structure, moving from more conventional narratives towards fragmented, collage-like compositions, before ultimately synthesising these approaches in Flesh.

His first published works adhered largely to traditional novelistic forms. London and the South-East (2008) focuses intently on a single character, Paul Rainey, a man defined by a painful knot of self-hatred. This debut work established Szalay’s enduring preoccupation with the isolated, miserable male protagonist, illustrating the difficulties of chasing commercial leads and the dehumanising aspects of work. This early period also included the publication of The Innocent (2009) and Spring (2011). Spring was noted explicitly for the literary skill it displayed in depicting non-closure and emotional ambiguity, with one reviewer describing Szalay’s ability to write with brilliance about twilight

A pivotal moment in Szalay’s career arrived when he consciously challenged the constraints of traditional narrative structure. His works All That Man Is (2016) and Turbulence demonstrated a marked preference for segmented forms, where individual stories are carefully linked to form a coherent whole.

Szalay himself was emphatic that All That Man Is should not be considered merely a collection of stories but rather a unified collage-novel, a work explicitly designed to coalesce in the reader’s mind. The book is composed of nine segments, each one following a distinct European man, with each subsequent protagonist being five to ten years older than the last, spanning various ages and professions across the continent. This deliberate, chronological structure illustrates the notion of the Three Ages of Man. By making all nine protagonists male, Szalay intended for them to aggregate into a single composite protagonist, unifying the book thematically. This structure demanded that the reader perform significant imaginative work in the gaps between the segments, allowing Szalay to cover a vast amount of human experience without relying on the structural demands of a lengthy 19th-century novel.

He achieved a similar, expansive effect in Turbulence, which won the Edge Hill Prize. This work is a collection of twelve stories linked by the chain of passengers on a series of intercontinental flights. The structure deliberately emphasises shared mortality and global interconnection, an idea reflected in the JFK quote encountered by the final character: our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. This approach demonstrates Szalay’s consistent desire to achieve universality through multiplicity, creating a collective portrait that illustrates a shared human experience rather than detailing the life of just one individual.

Flesh (2025) marks a crucial structural refocus, returning to a narrative that follows a single main character, István. This choice was essential due to the specific themes of the book, which necessitated charting how decisive, specific experiences — particularly traumatic and sexual events — alter the long-term trajectory of one individual’s life.

Despite the shift back to a singular protagonist, the novel retains the episodic sensibility of his fragmented works, divided into ten chronological chapters. Critics have described Flesh as the most novelistic of his recent books, while simultaneously noting that it still utilises the formal gaps that Szalay values, allowing the reader to fill in transitional periods. This synthesis of approach allows the author to trace the subtle yet profound effect of the past on the present.

We can contrast the two major approaches Szalay has used: in All That Man Is, the protagonist was a composite, featuring nine separate men in sequential age progression across Europe. The narrative goal was universality through multiplicity, presenting an expansive survey of continental experience. The primary theme was European masculinity in crisis, alongside shared longing and inarticulateness. In contrast, Flesh has a singular protagonist, István, whose life is charted through a chronological journey. The primary theme shifts to ontological existence, defined as being a machine made of meat, and István’s passive response to external forces and trauma. The pacing is propulsive and focused, following the tides of money and power, with a narrative goal of achieving depth through exteriority and physicality.

Szalay’s narrative technique is defined by an austere minimalism, a highly cinematic execution, and a fundamental structural reliance on exteriority. These elements collectively generate emotional tension through careful observational distance and controlled omission.

The author is celebrated widely for his formal restraint, often described as a master of the flinty, spare sentence. In Flesh, this aesthetic approach has been pared things back even more brutally, resulting in a novel characterised by controlled, austere minimalism. The prose is highly compressed and elliptical, employing terse language to convey precisely the needed amount of detail. Dialogue is frequently unconventional and stunted, actively minimising explicit emotional exchange between characters.

This stylistic flatness of the prose has been likened to Henry Green’s modernist fiction, where such austere deployment serves to question the very possibility of meaningful emotional connection, sometimes resulting in an intensity that approaches the absurd. Crucially, this minimalist style serves a crucial thematic function: it structurally mirrors István’s internal world, characterising him as a man barely on speaking terms with his own feelings. The style reflects his fundamental belief that words are a woefully inadequate tool for confronting existential reality.

For writers, Szalay’s use of cinematic technique is particularly instructive. He frequently acknowledges the strong influence of film on his literary craft, citing directors such as Eric Rohmer and Alfred Hitchcock. His application of filmic strategy is crucial for generating tension in his novels.

Szalay employs a Hitchcockian mechanism where a story begins by immediately revealing a key piece of information or a dramatic moment, then temporarily retreats, only to lead up to it again. This deliberate narrative manipulation fundamentally changes the nature of the reader’s engagement. Rather than focusing on the ‘what’s going to happen next?’ — a question Szalay deems two-dimensional — the tension shifts compellingly to how will it happen and how the characters will react. This approach creates a more palpable tension, resulting in a book that the Booker judges described as hypnotically tense and compelling.

The most defining feature of Szalay’s technique, particularly in Flesh, is its fundamental focus on exteriority. The novel is characterised as a novel of the body in motion, tracking the protagonist István almost entirely through his external, physical, and transactional existence. The novel meticulously documents changes in István’s external life: the various jobs he holds, the types of food he eats, the brands of cigarettes he smokes, and the different women he has sex with.

A crucial element of this technique is the concept of the Off-Screen Event. The novel consistently downplays, or handles off-screen, the internal, transitional, and psychological events that typically drive traditional character development. Readers only learn of István’s pivotal, life-altering experiences — such as his tour in Iraq with the Hungarian Army, his time in juvenile detention, or the birth of his child — in the aftermath, observing only their lasting external effects. The use of verby, staccato prose and the present tense serves as the ideal formal mechanism for propelling the reader through time, concentrating solely on the immediacy of István’s physical presence.

This stylistic commitment to exteriority, where the novel leverages the unsaid to speak volumes, reflects a deep literary commitment to portraying emotional absence. By presenting István as a deeply reticent man who struggles immensely to articulate his inner world, the minimalist style structurally embodies the character’s emotional repression. The reader becomes acutely aware of the many absences — the core psychological reality that the character cannot confront or articulate. This creates a critical tension: the narrative is event-driven and propulsive, yet the protagonist often feels remote and challenging to connect with. This emotional coldness is not a failure of characterisation, but an authentic portrayal of central forces in contemporary life: passivity, numbness, randomness, chance.

***Flesh*: Plot, Philosophy, and the Modern Male**

Flesh recounts the life of István, following him chronologically from adolescence into middle age. The structure and plot are precisely engineered to explore major ontological concerns regarding fate and agency.

The narrative begins when István is a shy and awkward adolescent living with his mother in a Hungarian housing project, where he is unfamiliar with social rituals and feels isolated. His initial, defining experience is a complex, clandestine affair with an older, married neighbour. This affair rapidly spirals out of control, culminating in an act of tragedy and violence.

This incident sets his life onto a deterministic, inevitable path. He is subsequently led through borstal, followed by a stretch serving in the military in Iraq with the Hungarian Army. István then uproots his life, moving to London, where he experiences a vertiginous climb up the British class strata. His silence and physical utility make him highly effective as personal security for London’s super-rich, elevating him temporarily into the European top one per cent of income earners. This ascent is driven by competing, often self-destructive, impulses for wealth, status, and intimacy. Inevitably, these impulses threaten to undo him, leading to an economic decline and a stoic, melancholy return to the Hungarian town where he grew up. This conclusion affirms Szalay’s favoured narrative shape, the circle, where István subtly finds in his end, his beginning.

The novel’s narrative ambition is grandly philosophical. Sharing a literary lineage with Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, Szalay set out explicitly to write about the Big Question. He sought to explore what it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat and the numbing strangeness of being alive. Szalay stated his apparent intention was to write about life as a physical experience, focusing intensely on the nature of being a living body in the world.

Central to the novel’s critique is the dichotomy between István’s expansive global movement and his static, isolated internal state — he remains a psychologically isolated and taciturn man from teenager to middle age. This contrast suggests that geopolitical experience or external success cannot overcome profound, foundational, personal trauma, thereby demonstrating the inherent limits of modern socio-economic mobility.

István himself embodies a profound, unsettling lack of agency. He is emphatically not the agentive, questing hero typically found in novels, but rather a man who is continuously buffeted by forces beyond his control, accepting the vagaries of life as outside his locus of control. His life progression feels like an inevitability, marked by unresolved trauma that worms its way through every page, illustrating a deeply fatalistic view of individual destiny where lows are guaranteed to follow highs. Even his ascent to wealth is temporary and volatile, showing that global economic tides — the tides of money and power — can equally uplift and crash the individual, reinforcing the sense of external dominion over personal fate.

Thematic Critique: Masculinity, Trauma, and Transactional Eros

Flesh conducts a severe and unflinching analysis of contemporary masculinity, placing economic migration, trauma, and the body at the forefront of its concerns.

The novel has been lauded as an essential, if uncomfortable, piece of contemporary literature, offering an unusually, confrontationally honest protagonist. It provides a refreshing, illuminating and true reckoning with the potentially destructive aspects of male character.

István is drawn as a stereotypically masculine figure: impulsive, physical, and profoundly emotionally remote. His defining characteristic is his internal repression — his inability… to understand himself was frustrating, demonstrating his struggle to cope with or comprehend incredibly challenging inner emotions and feelings. A persistent element of István’s characterisation is the contained threat of violence. This potential for force is established early by the violence that concludes his initial affair and is continuously reinforced by his subsequent careers in private security and the military in Iraq. This physicality positions him as a silent, physical presence defined by latent or overt force, underscoring the destructive potential that Szalay aims to illuminate.

Szalay foregrounds sexuality as a primary motivating factor in Flesh, utilising precise descriptions of sex that go beyond his previous works. He argues that sexual experiences are often decisive in terms of the course that our lives take.

The critical reception of the sexual content was polarised. Some reviewers found the sex scenes overly masculine and excessive, and characterised them as transactional and with no connection. This portrayal aligns perfectly with István’s essential emotional vacuum. The analysis suggests that, for István, sex functions as a release and is easy and satisfying. In sharp contrast, Love is a complication to sex. This reinforces the novel’s focus on exteriority and István’s relentless pursuit of physical satisfaction without the accompanying complexity of intimacy, which his deeply repressed emotional state simply cannot handle.

The novel’s structural power derives directly from its comprehensive charting of unresolved trauma and its aftermath. The early violence and his subsequent experiences in borstal and war create a profound emotional cost that István never processes. The result is an existence where trauma worms its way through every page.

The novel’s core tension resides in the continuous contrast between István’s physical and economic status in the present (a life of luxury, travel, and movement) and the unyielding, corrosive influence of the past. István’s inability to articulate or access these core feelings — stylistically embodied by the book’s stark, minimalist approach — ensures that the trauma remains perpetually indelible yet imperceptible to the character himself.

Geography, Class Mobility, and European Fracture

Flesh operates as a powerful commentary on contemporary Europe and the precarity inherent in the globalised economy. István’s journey across the continent, particularly his move from Hungary to London, exemplifies the challenges faced by protagonists caught between nations, often grappling with profound isolation and loneliness. His journey highlights the struggles of immigrant life.

The novel places the class divide in sharp relief by tracing István’s ascent from the Hungarian housing project to the realm of the wealthy elite in London. His temporary success is based solely on his physical utility, a physical transaction enabled by the global market that values his capacity for protection and violence. The essential fatalism of the narrative is demonstrated by the fact that this socio-economic mobility is ultimately conditional and temporary, reinforcing the key theme that István is continually buffeted by forces beyond his control.

It is worth noting that while the novel focuses intensely on class and physicality, it makes almost no mention of race, treating István’s whiteness almost as a default. However, his status as a working-class individual and an immigrant is precisely what exposes him to the power hierarchies of the elite for whom he works, where he is routinely condescended to.

stván’s intrinsic unlikability — which stems from his unkind interior monologues and emotional remoteness. This was a defining feature of the novel, leading to a highly divisive critical response, with readers split between pity and dislike. This divergence indicates that Szalay successfully subverts the conventional literary requirement for reader empathy. By deliberately refusing to grant István emotional warmth or charm, the narrative compels the reader to confront, rather than merely sympathise with, the reality of modern male inarticulacy and isolation. The protagonist’s remoteness is thus an essential element of the novel’s structural honesty, affirming its purpose as an illuminating and true portrait of contemporary male psychology.

David Szalay’s Flesh represents a significant evolution in his technique, expertly combining the thematic universality of his previous fragmented works with the focused intensity of a single, chronological life story. The novel stands as a powerful and necessary intervention in contemporary literature, offering a profound critique of individual agency and fate within the vast, indifferent structures of the globalised European economy.

The novel holds critical value because it describes and reckons with the potentially destructive aspects of their character that many contemporary male writers choose to avoid. Through its commitment to exteriority and its austere prose, Flesh manages to create a moving work of art that uses formal restraint as a mechanism to reveal profound emotional truths about unarticulated pain and isolation.

The novel’s structural inevitability is confirmed by its cyclical conclusion, where István’s life returns to its point of origin. The cycle of ascent and descent, coupled with the persistence of his foundational trauma, underscores the novel’s fatalistic view of personal destiny. It suggests that individual struggles are less about achieving control and more about being continuously buffeted by external forces — whether those forces are geopolitical, economic, or erotic.

The highly divisive reception generated by Flesh — the fact that readers were totally sucked into it, without actually really enjoying it very much — confirms the potency and success of Szalay’s challenging aesthetic strategy. The novel’s deliberate refusal to provide interior access or emotional comfort to the reader is precisely what makes it profound and memorable, aligning perfectly with its core ambition to be a confrontationally honest exploration of the modern male psyche. This earned, extreme approach to both narrative and characterisation suggests a robust new direction for Szalay’s technique, confirming that his trajectory remains one that bears close watching in the coming years. For writers, the lesson is clear: authentic emotional depth can often be achieved not through an abundance of psychological explanation, but through stringent, cinematic restraint and a relentless focus on external, physical reality.

The Unfolding Prophecy: Why Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Parable of the Sower’ Resonates Now More Than Ever

Courtesy of the Seattle Public Library; courtesy of the Octavia E. Butler Estate

In 1993, a groundbreaking work of speculative fiction offered a terrifying glimpse into a near-future America ravaged by climate change, economic collapse, and social unrest. At the time, Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower was critically acclaimed but remained a powerful, albeit niche, entry in the science fiction canon. Yet, almost three decades later, the novel performed a feat nearly as astonishing as its foresight: it became a surprise best-seller, soaring onto the New York Times list in 2020. This unexpected resurgence was not merely an act of good timing; it was a collective public realisation that the world Butler had so meticulously envisioned was no longer a distant possibility, but a chillingly accurate reflection of our own.

For writers, this story offers a masterclass not only in world-building but in the very purpose of fiction. Butler’s work demonstrates how the most effective speculative narratives are not detached fantasies but logical, extrapolated projections of our present reality. Her novel is a testament to the power of a writer’s unflinching gaze—the ability to look at existing social ills and trace them to their harrowing, yet logical, conclusion. In doing so, she provides a powerful model for how to craft a story that serves not only as a cautionary tale but as a blueprint for resilience. It is a work that asks, and attempts to answer, the most urgent question of our time: once a world begins to fall apart, what does it take to build a new one from its ashes?

The prophetic power of Octavia Butler’s writing is rooted in the stark realities of her own life. Born in Pasadena, California, in 1947, she grew up in a city that, while not legally segregated, maintained de facto racial and social divisions. Her early life was marked by poverty; her father, a shoe shiner, died when she was seven, and she was raised by her mother, a domestic worker, and her grandmother. Butler’s experience of accompanying her mother to wealthy homes and being forced to enter through the “back door” left an indelible mark on her psyche, a direct observation of systemic inequality that would later form the thematic bedrock of her work. She would later attempt to resolve these feelings in her most famous novel, Kindred, but the critique of social stratification is even more explicit in the world of Parable of the Sower.

Butler also had to overcome significant personal challenges to find her voice. She struggled with dyslexia as a child, a condition her teachers often misinterpreted as a lack of effort. Despite this, she was a voracious reader, devouring everything from the literary to the mundane. Her lifelong dream of writing was sparked at the age of nine after she saw a B-movie, Devil Girl from Mars, and thought to herself, “Geez, I can write a better story than that!”.

This moment of creative defiance set her on a path of relentless discipline. She began trying to sell her stories at the age of thirteen, but her early stories were so unconventional that many teachers accused her of having copied them. Her journey to becoming a professional writer was arduous, marked by years of rejection and a series of menial jobs, including telemarketer, potato chip inspector, and dishwasher. Throughout this period, she maintained a punishing schedule, rising at two o’clock in the morning to write before heading to work. This personal history of struggle, persistence, and an unwavering commitment to her craft shaped her literary vision, which always approached the science fiction genre “self-consciously as an African American woman marked by a particular history”.

The political and social critiques embedded in Parable of the Sower are thus deeply personal. The novel’s portrayal of a society divided by literal and figurative walls—where the privileged are insulated within gated communities while the poor and homeless are left to fend for themselves—is a direct echo of her childhood experiences. By transforming her personal experience with segregation and classism into a global social collapse, Butler elevated her work from mere fiction to a searing critique.

Parable of the Sower weaves a complex tapestry of interconnected themes that collectively form a philosophical framework for survival. The novel is less a simple post-apocalyptic narrative and more a thoughtful examination of how societies collapse and how new ones can be built from the ruins. For writers, it provides an example of how to anchor a fictional world with a compelling and consistent philosophy.

The central philosophical tenet of the novel is Lauren Olamina’s new religion, Earthseed, whose core scripture proclaims, “God Is Change”. This belief is a radical departure from the static, traditional Christian faith espoused by her father, which Lauren finds untenable in a world unravelling around them. For Lauren, resisting change is an act of denial that invites a destructive transition. Earthseed posits that change is the only constant and the only lasting truth.

This is not a passive acceptance of fate but an active mandate to engage, shape, and intentionally influence change to achieve transformative results. The novel argues that in a turbulent world, only those who demonstrate “resiliency” and “ongoing individual adaptability” are best able to survive and thrive. This adaptability is manifested through hard work, education, purpose, kindness, and community, which collectively breed a more tangible form of hope than blind faith in a “capricious and, in her mind, uncaring Christian God”. This philosophical framework provides a moral and practical compass for the characters, transforming a story of survival into a chronicle of evolution.

Despite the backdrop of environmental devastation, social decay, and constant violence, the novel is underpinned by a continuous thread of rebirth, regeneration, and rebuilding. Lauren observes life-affirming acts, such as people getting married and having children, even as fires rage across the land. This cyclical view of destruction and creation is central to the Earthseed philosophy. The concept is explicitly symbolised when Lauren raises the notion of a phoenix being reborn from its own ashes before her community is burned to the ground. The theme is further reinforced by the sermon her father gave on Noah’s perseverance in the face of God’s impending destruction. Following the fire that razes Bankole’s land, the group immediately begins to reseed the arable land and rebuild lost houses, embodying the principle that new life can emerge from the ashes of the old.

Parable of the Sower presents a sharp critique of individualism by contrasting the self-interested residents of Lauren’s walled community, Robledo, with the nascent, altruistic society she forges. The walled enclave, a microcosm of societal collapse, is populated by individuals who, driven by self-interest, betray neighbours and neglect children. Their isolationist mindset and rigid adherence to old social constructs prove “untenable” in a world that has fundamentally changed. In stark contrast, the Earthseed community Lauren builds is founded on collective purpose, kindness, and the principle of putting the “group ahead of the individual”. The journey itself, which forces strangers to band together and rely on one another, is the crucible for this new social model.

For writers of social commentary, the lesson of Parable of the Sower is that a compelling dystopia doesn’t require a single, cataclysmic event. Butler’s world is not the result of a nuclear war or a zombie plague but a slow-motion unravelling, disintegrating bit by bit. This societal decay is a direct consequence of the interconnected crises of global warming, growing wealth inequality, and corporate greed. The novel critiques late-stage capitalism and the neo-conservative assault on the welfare state by depicting a world where public services have been privatised, leading to the rise of company towns that recruit people into a form of modern slavery. As the economy collapses, society devolves into lawlessness, with armed gangs, drug addiction, and rampant violence filling the power vacuum.

This portrayal grounds the novel not in fantasy but in a logical, if terrifying, extension of present-day trends. The novel’s recent success is a direct consequence of this frighteningly realistic vision that contemporary readers find all too recognisable. As the world grapples with a deepening climate crisis, political demagoguery, and the rise of populism, Parable of the Sower functions as a warped mirror of where we already are.

The Plain and the Poetic: Butler’s Stylistic Mastery

Octavia Butler’s writing style in Parable of the Sower is a study in contrast, serving as both a narrative device and a reflection of the novel’s core philosophical framework. The narrative is presented as Lauren Olamina’s personal journal, a choice that gives the prose a deceptively simple quality. The writing is plain and straightforward, eschewing ornate language and complex sentence structures in favour of basic “Subject-Verb-Object” construction. Lauren just wants to tell you the truth, and the raw, unadorned nature of her prose makes the harrowing, intense events of the novel feel all the more visceral and authentic. The journal format also blurs the line between fiction and reality, with Lauren noting that reading science fiction helps her to understand her own world, a clever meta-fictional gesture by Butler herself.

This plain prose, however, is juxtaposed with the poetic and philosophical verses of Earthseed, which are distilled into a form that resembles scripture. These verses, presented in short, broken lines, are simple in their content but weighty in their meaning, serving to heighten the seriousness and the emotion of Lauren’s philosophical realisations. This stylistic duality is far from a mere aesthetic choice. It embodies the novel’s central argument: that to survive a profound crisis, one must attend to both the brutal, material realities of the present and the guiding, abstract principles of a new philosophy. The plain prose represents the raw struggle for survival, while the poetic verse provides the higher purpose that makes that struggle meaningful. It suggests that a new society cannot be built on pragmatism alone; it requires a compelling vision to strive towards. By combining these two distinct styles, Butler creates a narrative that is both grounded in reality and soaring in its philosophical ambition, a form that perfectly mirrors the novel’s central argument for a union of practical action and moral purpose.

The enduring impact of Parable of the Sower is a remarkable testament to its foresight. Upon its initial publication in 1993, the novel was critically acclaimed, earning a place on the New York Times Notable Book of the Year list in 1994 and a Nebula Award nomination. However, its success was a slow burn, finding its dedicated audience among science fiction fans, Black readers, and feminists. The novel’s true cultural moment arrived nearly three decades later when it became a New York Times best-seller, transforming the novel from speculative fiction into a chillingly accurate reflection of contemporary reality. The novel has since been adapted into an opera and a graphic novel, while NASA honoured Butler’s influence by naming the Mars rover’s touchdown site “Octavia E. Butler Landing”.

The central insight of the novel is that environmental degradation is not a stand-alone crisis but is inextricably linked to socio-economic and political decline. The book meticulously details how climate change-induced droughts, water scarcity, and extreme weather events lead to a loss of agricultural land, which in turn makes food scarce and people more selfish. This scarcity creates an unpleasant social environment, full of fear and distrust, which exacerbates existing social divisions and leads to lawlessness. The novel’s portrayal of climate migration, with Lauren and her companions forced to travel for survival, is a central part of this and echoes the real-world experiences of millions of people who have been internally or internationally displaced by climate change, particularly those in Central America who are migrating due to droughts.

Unlike many cli-fi novels that are oddly quiet about what initially brought the world to the brink of collapse, Butler’s work explicitly engages with the socio-economic origins of climate catastrophe. This places her in a category with authors like Kim Stanley Robinson, who understand that climate change is a socio-political, not just an environmental, problem.

Perhaps the most controversial and debated element of the novel is the Earthseed philosophy’s ultimate goal: the Destiny of humankind is to take root among the stars. Critics have argued that this vision of space colonisation is a form of escapist libertarian frontierism that undermines the novel’s commitment to solving problems on Earth. This perspective views the Destiny as a selfish, Elon Musk-esque fantasy that is disingenuous to the struggles of marginalised communities and fails to offer a practical solution for the planet’s problems.

However, a more nuanced reading of the novel presents a compelling counterargument. From this perspective, the pursuit of an interstellar destiny is not an act of escape but an evolutionary necessity. It argues that caring for Earth and reaching for the stars are not “mutually exclusive” but “mutually dependent” goals. The grand challenge of colonising another planet could provide the “perspective from outside of Earth” needed to develop the social, technical, and legal systems required to preserve our home planet. In this view, Destiny is a tool and a secular vision for building a more compassionate and inclusive society, free from the conflicts that have plagued humanity on Earth. The ambiguity of this conclusion forces the reader to grapple with a complex question: what kind of grand vision is necessary to motivate a species to overcome its self-destructive tendencies?

Write Your Way to Well-being: The Benefits of Journaling

For most writers, the journal is a place for capturing a fleeting idea, working out a tricky plot point, or simply recording the day’s events. But what if that simple act of putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) is doing far more than helping you with your craft? What if it’s a powerful tool for improving your health?

The practice of personal writing has evolved from a simple way to chronicle daily life into a scientifically supported method for managing mental and physical well-being. This post explores the health benefits of journaling, offering insights into why this creative practice is more than just a personal log.

A Tale of Two Notebooks: The Diarist vs. The Journal Keeper

To appreciate the therapeutic benefits of personal writing, it’s helpful to understand the difference between two of its most common forms: the diary and the reflective journal. Although they appear similar, they serve fundamentally different purposes.

A diary is defined by its descriptive and chronological nature. Its main purpose is to keep a factual, day-by-day log of daily activities and experiences, such as where you went and what you did. Entries are usually simple, focused on recording events for later reminiscing or for tracking things like health or personal history.

In contrast, a reflective journal is more introspective and thematic. While it may contain elements of a diary, its core purpose is to explore the “why” and “how” behind your experiences. It’s a vehicle for exploring thoughts, making sense of emotions, and forming connections between your inner feelings and external events. This type of writing is more expressive, less structured, and can include anything from philosophical ideas to sketches or disconnected notes. It’s a tool for self-authorship — a record of your personal development, plans, and aspirations.

The Health Benefits of Putting Pen to Paper

The simple act of writing can have a wide range of positive effects on both your mind and body. Studies have shown that when you write about your deepest thoughts and feelings, you can improve your physical and emotional health.

For the Mind:

Stress and Anxiety Relief: Journaling is a powerful stress management tool that can reduce symptoms of anxiety and feelings of distress. It provides an outlet for emotional release, which can untangle chaotic thoughts and break the cycle of obsessive thinking. Writing helps create the necessary distance to look at your thoughts objectively, rather than being overwhelmed by them — a process known as cognitive defusion.
Emotional Regulation and Self-Awareness: By consistently articulating your feelings and experiences, you gain a deeper understanding of your inner world. This enables you to recognise recurring patterns in your thoughts and emotional responses, offering valuable insights into your triggers, strengths, and weaknesses. This heightened awareness leads to healthier emotional regulation and a reduction in feelings of overwhelm and stress.
Resilience and Problem-Solving: Journaling is an effective way to build resilience—the ability to cope with adversity and transform challenges into personal growth. By writing about your setbacks and small wins, you can clarify what drains or restores your energy. The process of reflecting on challenges from a new perspective allows you to reframe obstacles as opportunities for growth and reinforces your coping mechanisms.
Cognitive Boost: The benefits extend to your cognitive function. Writing can enhance cognitive processing and help organise chaotic thoughts into a coherent narrative. Research suggests that writing information down by hand, in particular, can improve memory recall and critical thinking skills. It has even been linked to higher grade averages for students who use learning journals.

For the Body:

The mind-body connection is a core part of the therapeutic value of journaling. The act of writing down and processing difficult emotions can ease the physical and mental burden of suppressing them. This process directly impacts the body’s stress response system.

Studies show that regular journaling can reduce cortisol levels—the body’s primary stress hormone—by up to 23% in some cases.
Writing can also boost immune system functioning, as measured by antibody response, and lower blood pressure.
Practising gratitude journaling, specifically, has been linked to improved sleep quality and duration.

For individuals with depression, expressive writing and gratitude journaling can be a valuable supplement to treatment, with research suggesting it can reduce depressive symptoms. Gratitude journaling works by retraining your attention to focus on the positive aspects of life, which can counter the negative bias often found in depression and anxiety and lead to a more optimistic outlook.

For those struggling with trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), journaling can be a particularly effective intervention. A retired soldier who used writing to cope with PTSD described the process as “de-fragmenting a hard disk,” where chaotic, fragmented memories became more organised and easier to deal with. Journaling allows individuals to continue their healing process outside of formal therapy, providing a safe and private space to process emotions. It can reduce symptoms of anger, distress, and PTSD, and the entries can even serve as a starting point for discussion during therapy sessions.

Journaling has also been shown to have a positive impact on the mental health of people living with chronic conditions. While it may not directly impact physical symptoms, writing can help manage the psychological challenges that accompany physical illness, such as stress, mood fluctuations, and feelings of depression.

A Writer’s Toolbox: Finding the Right Technique

Just as there are many genres of writing, there are different journaling techniques to support various needs and goals.

Expressive Writing: If you need to process a deeply upsetting or traumatic experience, expressive writing is your tool. It’s a way to express feelings in an unfiltered manner, serving as a “soundproof room” to unleash your authentic emotions.
Gratitude Journaling: This practice involves writing down the positive aspects of your life to shift your focus from challenges to appreciation. It’s an effective way to improve your mood, lower levels of depression, and cultivate an optimistic outlook.
Free Writing / Stream of Consciousness: For clearing mental clutter and unlocking creativity, this unstructured style is a direct conduit to your mind’s inner workings. It encourages you to pour out your thoughts without boundaries or set topics, which can uncover unexpected insights and new ideas for your work.
Strength Journaling: This technique focuses on reinforcing your personal strengths by exploring how you have used them in everyday life. It builds confidence and promotes a focus on your positive traits.

How to Build a Journaling Habit That Sticks

For journaling to be a lasting and beneficial practice, it must be simple and consistent. Inconsistency disrupts emotional processing and self-awareness. Start small—just 5 minutes a day is enough to build momentum. Consider pairing it with an existing daily habit, like your morning coffee, and keep your journal in plain sight to remind you.

Perhaps most importantly for writers, it is crucial to avoid a few common pitfalls. Journaling can sometimes make things worse if it leads to rumination—the act of endlessly rehashing the same negative thoughts and problems without seeking solutions. This can exacerbate mental health issues. For journaling to be therapeutic, it must be a vehicle for solutions, not blame. The goal is to frame negative events positively, considering what you can learn from them and what opportunities they present.

A Final Word

The simple act of writing, whether to process a traumatic event or simply record the day, is a powerful tool for holistic health. It’s a way to move from a state of emotional and neurological inhibition to one of cognitive and psychological integration. It can calm the parts of your brain that process stress and emotion, helping to form new, healthier neural connections.

The evidence consistently points to the profound and wide-ranging benefits of this enduring practice. For writers, it offers more than just material; it’s a way to actively improve your emotional regulation, build resilience, and, in doing so, to author a more resilient and meaningful life, both on and off the page.

The Booker Dozen: The Authors Behind the 2025 Longlist

The Booker Prize is arguably one of the most significant literary accolades in the English-speaking world, a beacon that shines a light on fiction’s most compelling voices. For writers, making the longlist – the esteemed “Booker Dozen” – is a career-defining moment, a testament to months, if not years, of dedicated craft. This year, the 2025 longlist, unveiled on 29th July, has truly delivered a “wonderful heap” of novels, as described by this year’s chair of judges, the inimitable Roddy Doyle.

This year’s selection is a rich tapestry, featuring authors from four continents and nine countries, notable for its blend of experience and fresh perspective. We have one previous Booker winner, Kiran Desai, making a return, alongside two debut novelists, Ledia Xhoga and Maria Reva.

Claire Adam: Love Forms

Trinidad and Tobago native Claire Adam makes her second appearance in the literary spotlight with Love Forms. Her debut, Golden Child, won the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2019, marking her as a distinctive voice. In Love Forms, Adam delves into the profound emotional landscape of a woman grappling with the consequences of a decision made in her youth: giving up a child for adoption. Expect an intimate, profoundly human story that explores the enduring power of family and the paths not taken.

Tash Aw: The South

Malaysian author Tash Aw is no stranger to literary acclaim, having won the Whitbread Book Awards First Novel Award in 2005 for The Harmony Silk Factory. The South is the ambitious first instalment in a planned quartet, setting its narrative in 1990s Malaysia. Here, Aw expertly weaves the lives of two farming families against a backdrop of rapid modernisation and the nascent, yet increasingly urgent, threat of climate change. It’s a novel that promises to be both a sprawling family saga and a potent commentary on environmental and societal shifts.

Natasha Brown: Universality

British author Natasha Brown exploded onto the literary scene with her debut, Assembly, a Betty Trask Award winner. Her follow-up, Universality, is the shortest book on the longlist at a concise 156 pages, yet it packs a powerful punch. This highly stylised novel is described as a merciless satire of the contemporary media landscape, chronicling a viral long-read. Brown’s work is sharp, incisive, and unafraid to tackle pressing social themes with a minimalist, yet impactful, prose.

Jonathan Buckley: One Boat

With One Boat, Jonathan Buckley presents his thirteenth novel, showcasing a prolific and consistently inventive career. A British author, Buckley previously won the Novel Prize in 2022 for his book Tell. His latest offering takes readers on a philosophical journey to Greece, where a woman navigates her grief. It’s a novel that promises deep reflections on ethics, memory, and the very nature of thought, delivered with Buckley’s characteristic intellectual rigour and elegant prose.

Susan Choi: Flashlight

Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Susan Choi brings her formidable talent to the longlist with Flashlight. Choi’s ability to craft intricate narratives is well-established, and this novel is no exception. Flashlight illuminates the far-reaching effects of political upheaval on a family with deep roots in Korea, Japan, and the United States. It’s a testament to her skill that online communities are already hailing it as “amazing” and “probably the best book I’ve read this year.”

Kiran Desai: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

Perhaps the most anticipated return to the Booker stage, Kiran Desai is the sole previous winner on this year’s longlist, having won in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss. After a nineteen-year hiatus, Desai returns with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a colossal 650-plus page epic. This vast novel is described as an intricate portrait of an interconnected world, painted with an exquisitely fine brush. Its sheer scope and Desai’s celebrated prose make it an undeniable frontrunner and a significant literary event.

Katie Kitamura: Audition

American author Katie Kitamura, whose novel Intimacies won France’s Prix Litteraire Lucien Barriere in 2023, brings her enigmatic style to the Booker longlist with Audition. This formally innovative novel employs contradictory narratives to explore themes of identity and perception, promising a thought-provoking and subtly unsettling reading experience. Readers have already been drawn into its “tricksy story,” sparking lively debates and interpretations.

Ben Markovits: The Rest of Our Lives

Former professional basketball player turned acclaimed author, American Ben Markovits previously won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2016. His latest, The Rest of Our Lives, is a poignant study of a father in the throes of a mid-life crisis as his children begin to leave home. Markovits excels at sensitive character studies, and this novel is poised to be a deeply resonant exploration of family, ageing, and the quiet shifts in personal identity.

Andrew Miller: The Land in Winter

British author Andrew Miller is celebrated for his atmospheric and deeply immersive historical fiction, having won the James Tait Black Prize for his 1997 novel, Ingenious Pain. In The Land in Winter, Miller transports readers to the UK’s “Big Freeze” of 1962-63, painting a vivid picture of two married couples in post-war England. His prose is praised for its ability to create a strong sense of place and to delve deep into the hearts of his characters, promising a rich and absorbing read.

Maria Reva: Endling

One of the two exciting debut novelists on the list, Canadian-Ukrainian author Maria Reva presents Endling, a novel that has captivated early readers. What begins as a “comic caper” takes a dramatic and profound turn as the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine “blows the book wide open,” forcing a re-evaluation of fiction’s purpose and the characters’ lives within it. Online forums have lauded it as “superb” and the “most interesting” book on the list, marking Reva as a powerful new voice.

David Szalay: Flesh

Hungarian-British author David Szalay, a Betty Trask Award winner for his debut in 2008, brings a truly unique offering with Flesh. This modern “everyman” story follows its central character, István, through a Hungarian childhood, military life, and on-the-make London. What sets it apart is its “unusual tactic” of “utterly refusing interiority,” keeping István’s inner life a mystery to the reader. This stylistic choice has been lauded as a genuinely new approach to fiction, making Flesh a compelling and innovative read.

Benjamin Wood: Seascraper

British author Benjamin Wood, who won France’s prix du roman Fnac in 2014, offers a quiet yet profoundly atmospheric novel in Seascraper. The book follows a young man who scrapes the seashore for shrimp in a changing England, using muted prose to evoke a powerful sense of place and the subtle shifts within both nature and human lives. It promises a contemplative and beautifully crafted narrative.

Ledia Xhoga: Misinterpretation

The second debut novelist to grace the longlist, Albanian-American Ledia Xhoga presents Misinterpretation. Xhoga, who previously found success as a playwright and won the 2024 New York City Book Award for outstanding debut author, brings her unique perspective to this portrait of an Albanian interpreter in New York. The novel delves into the complexities of translation, cultural duality, and the quiet burdens of compassion fatigue. It’s a timely and insightful exploration of language and identity in a globalised world.

The Power of the Booker

The Booker Prize longlist isn’t just a collection of great books; it’s a conversation starter, a literary compass, and a powerful platform for writers. For each of these thirteen authors, it represents not only a significant recognition of their craft but also a massive boost in readership and critical attention.

The judges – chaired by Roddy Doyle, and including Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Sarah Jessica Parker, Chris Power, and Kiley Reid – have clearly prioritised narrative strength, compelling characters, and a willingness to engage with the complexities of our “shaky present.” Their dedication to unearthing a “wonderful heap” of diverse and thought-provoking fiction is evident.

What Comes Next?

While we celebrate these authors and their books, the Booker journey is far from over. The next date is Tuesday, 23rd September 2025, when the six-book shortlist will be announced at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London – a new public event for the prize. Then, the literary world will hold its breath until Monday, 10th November 2025, when the winner will be named at Old Billingsgate, London.

The Architect of Dreams: Unravelling the Narrative Genius of Moebius

Jean Giraud. The name might not immediately resonate with everyone, but mention ‘Moebius’, and a universe of intricate, surreal, and breathtaking imagery springs to mind. This French graphic novelist, who sadly passed in 2012, was a titan of visual storytelling, a true visionary whose influence stretched far beyond the pages of comics, touching the very fabric of cinema, video games, and art itself. He was, in essence, two artists in one, a master craftsman known as ‘Gir’ and an unbound explorer known as ‘Moebius’, each persona a distinct facet of his unparalleled narrative architecture.

But how did one man cultivate such a profound duality, and more importantly, how did he build stories that continue to captivate and challenge audiences decades later? Let’s delve into the fascinating world of Jean Giraud and discover the secrets behind his narrative alchemy.

The Genesis of a Visionary: From Paris to the Desert

Born in a Parisian suburb in 1938, Giraud’s early life, marked by his parents’ divorce and upbringing by his grandparents, may have subtly laid the groundwork for his later adoption of distinct artistic personae. His childhood passion for Western films ignited his creative spark, leading him to sell his first story at the tender age of 15.

A pivotal moment arrived during a nine-month stay in Mexico, where the vast, desolate desert landscapes left an indelible impression on his mind. This experience of loneliness and introspection became a recurrent catalyst for his creative and personal growth, a symbolic blank canvas for infinite possibilities. Later, military service in Germany and Algeria further broadened his horizons, exposing him to exotic cultures that would infuse his later, more fantastical works. Upon his return, he honed his disciplined craft under the tutelage of Belgian artist Joseph Jijé Gillain, a crucial foundation for everything that followed.

Two Sides of a Coin: Gir and Moebius

The defining characteristic of Giraud’s career was his deliberate cultivation of two distinct artistic identities.

As ‘Gir’, he became a master of realistic, meticulously detailed brushwork, most famously in the Blueberry series, co-created with writer Jean-Michel Charlier in 1963. Blueberry was a Western that dared to subvert the genre’s norms. Mike S. Blueberry was no clean-cut hero; he was dirty, ugly and bad-tempered, a character who drank, smoked, gambled, and swore. What truly set Blueberry apart was its commitment to depicting lasting, irrevocable change in its protagonist. Blueberry aged, his face weathered, reflecting the harsh realities of his life and the unfolding history of the American West. This rigorous discipline in traditional storytelling provided Giraud with an unparalleled technical bedrock, allowing him to understand the ‘rules’ before he consciously chose to ‘break’ them.

Then came ‘Moebius’. First appearing in illustrations for the satirical magazine Hara-Kiri in the early 1960s, this pseudonym truly blossomed in 1974 with the co-founding of Métal Hurlant magazine. As Moebius, Giraud shed the constraints of realism, embracing loose and spontaneous penwork to explore the subconscious and create hitherto unseen vistas. This was the vehicle for his groundbreaking, often nonlinear works, such as Arzach, Le Garage Hermétique (The Airtight Garage), and L’Incal. The name ‘Moebius’ itself, chosen somewhat playfully, symbolised a twisted loop of paper and his one continuous, entwined identity as an artist, perfectly encapsulating his approach to narrative.

This strategic duality wasn’t just a stylistic choice; it was a profound mechanism for creative liberation. ‘Gir’ provided commercial stability, allowing ‘Moebius’ the freedom to experiment without commercial pressure, leading to an unparalleled breadth in his artistic output.

Architect of Imagined Realities: Moebius’s World-Building Mastery

Moebius was a visionary universe builder, infusing science fiction with an intense blend of reality and spirituality. His worlds were consistently described as detailed, dreamlike and simultaneously strange and familiar. He approached world-building with graphic spontaneity and improvisation, yet advised artists to make notes about the particulars of the world depicted to provide readers with recognisable characteristics. This suggests that even his most surreal worlds were underpinned by an internal logic.

Take The Incal, his epic space opera with Alejandro Jodorowsky. Set in a dystopian capital city within a human-dominated galactic empire, it vividly portrays a stratified society, with the fortunate at the top and The Others (mutants) living in misery below. This world features TV programmes showing filmed violence, a populace addicted to a love drug, and a president who undergoes repeated body transplants – a biting satire on societal control and consumerism. Moebius’s intricate cityscapes, massive spacecraft, and diverse inhabitants bring this allegorical world to life, making it a tangible backdrop for the protagonist’s fantastic spiritual journey.

Then there’s The Airtight Garage, one of his most experimental and personal comics. This narrative follows Major Grubert navigating a fantastical, self-contained universe within a hollow asteroid, comprising various pocket worlds across three levels. What’s remarkable is that it was created without a planned plot. Giraud described drawing sequences without any logical sense and then attempting to reconstruct them into a narrative. He intentionally introduced continuity problems each month, challenging himself to solve them, a process he called narrative kintsugi. This resulted in a narrative that is nearly impenetrable yet charming, a psychedelic, sequential romp that explores profound philosophical questions regarding the nature of existence and the relationship between author and creation.

The recurring motif of the desert, stemming from his transformative experience in Mexico, is central to his world-building philosophy. He equated the virginity of a simple sheet of paper to the desert, a boundless space for artistic choices and creation. This suggests that his worlds are not just external settings, but direct manifestations of his internal psychological and philosophical explorations, inviting readers on their own introspective journeys.

The Human and the Archetypal: Character Development

Giraud believed that for readers to connect with a story, characters must feel as if they have a life and personality of their own. He saw the human body as a narrative canvas, asserting that it transforms when brought to life, containing a ‘message in its structure… in every wrinkle, crease or fold of the face and body’, making character drawing a study of life. He stressed that artists must cultivate compassion and a love for humanity through profound observation to become a mirror of society and humanity.

As ‘Gir’, he revolutionised the Western hero with Mike S. Blueberry. Unlike the fearless lawmen of convention, Blueberry was dirty, ugly and bad-tempered, a deliberate subversion. Crucially, Blueberry was subject to the relentless force of time; his youthful looks faded, and his face became increasingly weathered, reflecting the lasting and irrevocable changes he endured. He evolved from a rebellious soldier to a jaded marshal, a fugitive, and a bitter cynic, becoming a pawn caught in a cruel web of fate. This commitment to depicting genuine, often painful, evolution was groundbreaking for the comics industry.

In contrast, The Incal‘s protagonist, John Difool, is a shambolic private eye and reluctant protagonist. Prone to mood swings and self-doubt, his name is a pun on John, the Fool, referencing the Tarot archetype. As the narrative progresses, Difool undergoes a profound transformation, becoming more heroic as he reluctantly accepts his fantastic spiritual journey. This evolution is central to the story’s allegory for repeating sins, the futility of complacency and the necessity for individual transformation.

Major Grubert in The Airtight Garage evolves in a humorous yet philosophical manner. As the creator of his world, his bizarre adventures serve as a meta-narrative, exploring the intricate relationship between the author and their creation. His development is less about linear progression and more about embodying the philosophical questions inherent in the act of creation itself.

Giraud’s meticulous attention to visual cues was paramount. He noted the difficulty of drawing people talking, as it involves a series of tiny movements — small yet with real significance, which speak to personality and life. He contrasted this with the generic gestures of superheroes. Even the clothing of the characters and their materials, the textures were equally important, conveying a vision of their experiences, of their lives, their situation in the adventure without words.

Beyond the Panel: Narrative Innovations

The term ‘Moebius’ has come to define a specific narrative structure characterised by twists and turns in unexpected ways, often leading to a non-linear or circular storytelling approach. Named after the Möbius strip, this style reflects how his stories can loop back on themselves, creating a distinctive reading experience. This non-linear structure actively enhances reader engagement by encouraging them to actively participate in piecing together the plot.

The Incal famously employs a circular narrative, with John Difool falling from a bridge at both the beginning and end, symbolising descent, ascent, and re-descent.

The Airtight Garage further exemplifies this with its surreal, fragmented storytelling and Giraud’s deliberate breaking of continuity, which challenges him, resulting in a narrative with a potentially unlimited incoherence factor. This approach allows characters to experience time loops or alternate realities, adding layers of complexity.

One of Moebius’s most radical innovations was the creation of wordless comics, with Arzach being the prime example. This collection of four wordless short stories was a bold move that truly showcased his passion for the genre. Following a silent warrior on a pterodactyl-like creature through a strange, desolate landscape, Arzach‘s imagery is often compared to dreams or the subconscious, demonstrating the power of pure visual storytelling to evoke complex emotions without the need for dialogue.

Giraud meticulously controlled the pacing and visual rhythm of his narratives. He asserted that the narration must harmonise with the drawings. The placement of your text must create a visual rhythm. The rhythm of your plot should be reflected in your visual cadence and the way you compress or expand time. He mastered panel layout: larger panels slowed the pace for contemplation, while smaller ones quickened it for urgency. The arrangement of panels, the size of the ‘gutter’ (the space between panels), and visual elements like colour, texture, and composition all contributed to the narrative flow and emotional resonance.

A hallmark of Moebius’s storytelling is his commitment to imbuing his graphic elements with abstract layers, giving equal importance to both the graphic elements and their abstract layers. His illustrations transcended mere plot progression, allowing readers to feel and reflect on the transcendence of life. This approach, comparable to that of H.P. Lovecraft and Douglas Adams, utilises science fiction to explore the inexplicable and otherworldly, seeking deeper meanings and a sense of wonder. His collaborations, such as The Incal, utilised his art for poetic, obscure, and surreal narratives, guiding the audience on a path to personal enlightenment.

The Enduring Legacy of a Narrative Alchemist

Jean Giraud, through his dual identities of Gir and Moebius, fundamentally reshaped the landscape of graphic storytelling. His career was a remarkable synthesis of meticulous craft and unbridled creative freedom. As Gir, he laid a robust foundation in traditional sequential art, delivering gritty realism and evolving character arcs. This disciplined practice instilled in him a profound understanding of narrative mechanics and visual communication.

The emergence of Moebius marked a radical departure, allowing Giraud to explore non-linear narratives, wordless comics, and deeply philosophical themes embedded within surreal, fantastical worlds. His approach to world-building transcended mere setting, becoming an externalisation of internal psychological and spiritual explorations, inviting readers into introspective journeys. His characters, whether the evolving anti-hero Blueberry or the reluctant spiritual guide John Difool, served as vehicles for profound societal commentary and universal human questions, their visual details conveying rich inner lives.

His innovations in pacing, visual rhythm, and the integration of abstract layers within his artwork fundamentally pushed the boundaries of sequential art and his ability to convey complex meaning and evoke deep emotional responses through pure imagery, without relying solely on words, established a new paradigm for the medium. This pioneering spirit extended beyond comics, deeply influencing filmmakers, video game designers, and artists across various disciplines, thereby broadening the scope of visual storytelling.

Jean Giraud’s legacy is that of a true narrative alchemist, one who transmuted personal experiences, rigorous artistic discipline, and boundless imagination into groundbreaking visual stories that continue to challenge, inspire, and redefine the possibilities of human expression.

The Art of Storytelling: Granta’s Enduring Impact

Granta has, for over a century, been a vital home for new writing, a mirror reflecting societal shifts, and a launchpad for some of the most significant voices in contemporary literature. From its unassuming beginnings as a student publication to its current stature as an international literary powerhouse, Granta‘s journey is a compelling narrative of evolution, bold editorial vision, and an unwavering belief in the power of the story.

Granta‘s origins are rooted in the halls of Cambridge University, where it was founded in 1889 by students and initially named The Granta after the local river. It began as a lively periodical featuring student politics, witty conversation – known as “badinage” – and nascent literary efforts. This foundational period established Granta‘s commitment to intellectual discourse and creative expression, setting the stage for its future prominence. Even in these early days, the magazine served as a nursery for future literary stars, publishing early works by writers who would later become household names, including A.A. Milne, Michael Frayn, Stevie Smith, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath. This demonstrates that even a seemingly niche or local platform, when dedicated to quality and providing a space for literary enterprise, can become a crucial early incubator for significant talent. The initial focus on “badinage” also hinted at an early, irreverent spirit, a characteristic that would resurface and define its later, more prominent incarnation.

However, by the 1970s, the publication faced severe financial difficulties and increasing student apathy, teetering on the brink of irrelevance. This precarious period underscored the inherent challenges faced by literary ventures and highlighted the critical need for radical intervention to ensure its survival and future impact. The magazine’s struggle illustrated that even a publication with a storied past and a history of nurturing talent could falter without a dynamic adaptation to changing times.

A pivotal moment in Granta‘s history was in 1979 when it was relaunched as a literary quarterly in paperback format. This transformation was spearheaded by a group of postgraduates, most notably Bill Buford and Peter de Bolla. The choice of a paperback format was a deliberate decision, making the magazine more accessible and distinguishing it from traditional academic journals, lending it the gravitas and permanence of a book.

Buford’s editorial vision was assertive and polemical. The first issue under their editorship was tellingly titled New American Writing, featuring authors like Joyce Carol Oates and Susan Sontag. Buford openly critiqued contemporary British fiction as “neither remarkable nor remarkably interesting” and suffering from “uninspired sameness.” He aimed to fill a “cultural gap” in Britain by introducing “challenging, diversified, and adventurous” American fiction. His focus later extended to “Dirty Realism,” a style characterised by “unadorned, unfurnished, low-rent tragedies” about everyday people, often written in a “flat, ‘unsurprised’ language.” This editorial stance was a deliberate act of “outrage” and boundary-crossing, positioning Granta as a rebellious force.

A few years after the relaunch, Buford conceived the idea for the “Best of Young British Novelists” issue. The first, Granta 7, published in partnership with Penguin in 1983, became a much-fêted list, featuring now-famous authors such as Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie. This series quickly cemented Granta‘s reputation as a discerning and influential voice in identifying emerging talent. The “Best of Young British Novelists” list was “much-fêted” and featured authors who “did indeed influence British fiction for decades to come.” Bill Buford himself said, “These young writers are the future of literature. Watch. History will prove me right.” This was not just a prediction; it was an active shaping of the literary landscape. This series illustrates the immense power of a respected literary institution to not just reflect but actively create literary trends and careers. Granta generated significant media attention and reader interest, effectively launching careers and influencing what publishers and readers considered “important” new voices. It became a “barometer of Britain’s changing literary landscape,” demonstrating how cultural capital can translate into tangible influence on literary production and consumption.

Granta Books was established ten years after the magazine’s relaunch, in 1989, by Bill Buford. Its goal was to publish “only writing we care passionately about,” focusing on impactful literature that “stimulates, inspires, addresses difficult questions, and examines intriguing periods of history.” Early notable publications included John Berger’s Once in Europa and Gabriel García Márquez’s Clandestine in Chile. The establishment of Granta Books ten years after the magazine’s relaunch indicates a natural expansion from a periodical platform to a full-fledged publishing house. The stated goal of Granta Books to publish “only writing we care passionately about” and to disseminate “impactful literature” directly mirrored the magazine’s editorial principles. This shows how a successful literary magazine can serve as an incubator for a larger publishing enterprise. The magazine identifies talent and trends, cultivates an audience, and builds a brand identity, which then provides a strong foundation for a book imprint. This synergy allows for a more comprehensive and sustained impact on the literary world, extending beyond quarterly issues to a permanent catalogue of influential books.

Following Bill Buford’s tenure, Granta has seen a succession of influential editors, each contributing to its evolving identity and reach. These transitions reflect broader shifts in literary discourse and the publishing landscape.

Ian Jack (1995-2007) Under his leadership, Granta continued the “Best of Young” series, notably launching the first “Best of Young American Novelists” issue in 1996. Jack’s approach for the British lists was to highlight “jolly good writers” and encourage readers to buy their books. His own editorial vision, as seen in the 1997 India issue, aimed to capture a country undergoing fundamental change, moving towards modernity, and introduced authors like Arundhati Roy to Western readers with an extract from The God of Small Things. He also edited the first “Best of Young American Novelists” issue, acknowledging the challenges of judging and famously describing the omission of Nicholson Baker as “insane and perverse.”

Jason Cowley (2007-2008) succeeded Jack, taking over in September 2007. His brief tenure was marked by a redesign of the magazine and the launch of a new website. He left in September 2008 to become the editor of the New Statesman.

Alex Clark (2008-2009) became Granta‘s first female editor in May 2008, but her tenure was also brief, ending in May 2009. Clark acknowledged the evolution of literary discourse to encompass writing beyond America and Britain, questioning whether the era of grand statements about literature’s direction had become anachronistic. Her approach valued the individual sensibility of writers, noting that fiction might “succeed best when it represents nothing but itself.” She sought to provide an “entertaining and illuminating sample of today’s literary landscape.”

John Freeman (2009-2013), an American editor, succeeded Alex Clark in May 2009, serving until 2013. Freeman recognised that Granta had become an insular “museum.” His vision was to make Granta more open, inclusive, and globally-minded, actively seeking “what was new in writing, anywhere in the world.” He aimed to treat writing globally “without making much fanfare over that parameter,” viewing it as an antidote to rising nationalism. He significantly diversified the team, hiring editors from various international backgrounds. Freeman also streamlined production, worked on multiple issues simultaneously, and pioneered localised launches, such as the successful Chicago issue, to engage real-world communities. He emphasised the importance of visual culture, revamping covers, and launched a dozen new international editions in translation.

Sigrid Rausing (Publisher since 2005, Editor 2013-2023) acquired Granta Publications in 2005, saving it from potential acquisition by larger houses. She became editor in 2013, serving until Autumn 2023, when she announced Thomas Meaney as her successor. Rausing expanded the list while maintaining Granta‘s “high literary character.” Her introductions to issues often reflect on complex societal and emotional states, such as isolation, grief, the relationship between individuals and the state, and the “conundrum of America.” She chaired the judging panel for the 2023 “Best of Young British Novelists.”

Thomas Meaney (Current Editor, from Autumn 2023) took over as editor from Sigrid Rausing in Autumn 2023. His editorial introductions explore concepts like “Generations,” examining how shared experiences define age cohorts and how understanding past generations informs the present. He continues Granta‘s tradition of engaging with contemporary global issues, as seen in issues like “China” and “Badlands.”

The evolution of Granta‘s editorial leadership illustrates a progression from a polemical stance to a more nuanced curatorial approach. Bill Buford’s initial editorial approach was “insistent, polemical, occasionally table-thumping,” actively challenging British literary norms. Alex Clark, while acknowledging this legacy, questioned whether “grand statements about literature, its provenance, its direction, its nature and its aim, has begun to seem anachronistic,” leaning towards individual literary sensibility. John Freeman then moved to a “global” focus, but without “much fanfare,” aiming for an “antidote for the deformed narratives of nationalism.” Sigrid Rausing’s introductions are more reflective and thematic. This shows a maturation in Granta‘s editorial posture. From an initially aggressive stance designed to disrupt and establish a new identity, the magazine has evolved into a more sophisticated, globally aware curatorial role. While still opinionated, the later editors demonstrate a greater comfort with complexity and a less prescriptive view of what “new writing” should be, reflecting broader shifts in literary criticism from manifestos to more nuanced, inclusive approaches.

The “Best of Young” series, a hallmark of Granta‘s influence, also serves as a continuous self-assessment and industry barometer. The series is published “decade by decade,” serving as a recurring benchmark for emerging talent. The judging panels change, and the criteria adapt (e.g., discussions about age limit changes and inclusion of non-novelists). This indicates a continuous, iterative process by which Granta assesses the literary landscape and its own role within it. Beyond merely identifying talent, the “Best of Young” series acts as a quadrennial (or decennial) self-reflection for Granta and the wider literary community. It forces a re-evaluation of what constitutes “young” and “novelistic” talent, sparking debates (like the ageism controversy) and revealing shifts in literary forms, demographics, and themes. It is a dynamic mechanism for the magazine to maintain its relevance and authority by actively engaging with and shaping the ongoing conversation about contemporary literature.

Granta‘s content has undergone a significant evolution, expanding its scope and deepening its engagement with the contemporary world. From its student origins, Granta published prose and poetry. After its 1979 relaunch, it consistently featured an “eclectic mix” of fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, journalism, photography, and poetry. This broad scope allows Granta to capture a multifaceted view of contemporary life and literary expression. The magazine also launched a dedicated poetry list in 2019, further cementing its commitment to diverse literary forms.

A defining characteristic of the post-1979 Granta is its quarterly issues curated around a central theme. These themes allow for deep exploration of subjects such as conflict, travel, language, the influence of America, generations, national identity (e.g., “China,” “Deutschland”), and personal experiences like “Dead Friends” or “In the Family.” This commitment reflects its dedication to engaging with a broad spectrum of literary forms and societal issues. This consistent use of central themes for each issue allows for a “deep exploration” of complex subjects. This moves beyond a mere collection of stories to a curated dialogue on specific societal issues, from conflict and travel to “Generations” and “Extraction.” This thematic approach elevates Granta from a simple literary anthology to a platform for intellectual and cultural discourse. It enables the magazine to engage with pressing contemporary issues through diverse literary lenses, fostering deeper understanding and conversation. This model differentiates it from more general literary journals and positions it as a significant contributor to cultural commentary, making literature a “powerful tool for advocacy and awareness.”

The profound impact of the “Best of Young” lists in identifying and nurturing new literary talent, shaping careers, and influencing literary trends cannot be overstated. The “Best of Young” lists (British, American, Spanish-Language, Brazilian) have been instrumental in highlighting the potential of writers under 40, cementing Granta‘s reputation as a “discerning and influential voice.” These lists have launched the careers of numerous acclaimed authors, including Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, and Ian McEwan. While sometimes controversial for perceived ageism or predictability, they consistently generate significant media attention and act as a “barometer of Britain’s changing literary landscape.”

While undeniably instrumental in launching careers and shaping literary trends, the “Best of Young” lists have also attracted criticism for “ageism” and “predictability.” The debate around the criteria (e.g., age limits, inclusion of non-novelists) highlights the tension between the desire to identify emerging talent and the inherent limitations and biases of such selective processes. This reveals the complex dynamics of literary gatekeeping and canon-formation. While such lists provide valuable exposure and validation, they also risk perpetuating certain biases or overlooking talent that does not fit predefined categories. The ongoing debates surrounding these lists underscore their power to both elevate and potentially exclude, making them a significant, albeit contested, force in the literary world.

The increasing prominence of translated fiction and international voices reflects a globalised literary landscape. Under John Freeman, Granta explicitly sought to treat writing globally and launched numerous international editions in translation. This commitment continues, with recent issues focusing on specific regions like China and Germany. Granta Magazine Editions, a new imprint launched in 2025, specifically focuses on publishing translated titles that emerge from the magazine’s “geographical spotlight issues,” indicating a strategic effort to bring excellent international writers to Anglo audiences. Granta has published works by thirty-one Nobel Prize laureates, many of whom are international authors. This reflects a conscious move away from a purely Anglo-American focus towards a truly global literary perspective. John Freeman’s push for “global” writing and the launch of international editions, coupled with the new Granta Magazine Editions imprint focusing on translations, demonstrates a deliberate strategy to expand beyond the Anglo-American literary sphere. This is explicitly framed as an “antidote to rising nationalism” and a response to the low translation rates in English publishing. This signifies a recognition that for a literary magazine to remain relevant and influential in an increasingly interconnected world, it must actively champion voices from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Granta‘s commitment to translated fiction is not just about expanding its content; it is a strategic move to address a perceived deficit in English-language publishing and to position itself as a truly international literary arbiter, fostering cross-cultural understanding through storytelling.

Granta‘s journey has been marked by a continuous adaptation of its format and reach, leveraging new technologies to enhance its presence. Initially a student periodical, Granta transformed into a literary quarterly in paperback format in 1979. This physical format choice, resembling a book, contributed to its perceived gravitas and permanence. The covers themselves evolved, with artistic directors like Michael Salu creating textured, conceptually rich designs, sometimes using antiquated printing processes to reflect themes. The choice of a paperback book-like format in 1979 and the continued emphasis on distinctive, often artistically crafted covers suggests that Granta views itself as more than just a magazine. The use of traditional printing techniques for covers further emphasises this. This indicates a conscious effort to imbue the physical object with artistic and intellectual weight, distinguishing Granta from ephemeral periodicals. It appeals to a readership that values the tactile and aesthetic experience of reading, positioning the magazine as a collectible, enduring work of art in itself, rather than just a vessel for content. This strategy reinforces its high literary character and premium branding.

The magazine has strategically embraced digital platforms to expand its reach and accessibility. It offers digital subscriptions, allowing access to its latest issues and an archive of over 160 back issues online and via a dedicated Granta app. In 2022, Granta Books launched a fully-searchable digital book collection in partnership with Exact Editions, complementing the magazine archive and targeting international scholars and students. This digital strategy reflects a commitment to sharing “high-quality writing as far and wide as possible.” The shift from a purely physical publication to offering digital subscriptions and a searchable online archive is not merely a convenience but a strategic move to ensure longevity and broaden accessibility. The digital book collection for scholars and students highlights a recognition of the academic and research value of its content. This demonstrates that in the modern publishing landscape, a robust digital strategy is no longer optional but essential for a literary magazine’s survival and continued influence. It transforms the magazine from a transient quarterly into a permanent, searchable, and globally accessible literary resource, enhancing its long-term impact and educational utility.

Granta‘s international significance is evident in its exploration of global subjects. Under John Freeman, the magazine launched a dozen new editions in translation across various countries, including Norway, Japan, Brazil, Bulgaria, Finland, Portugal, and Italy. These collaborations fostered a “braintrust of editors” and provided early exposure for international authors. The new Granta Magazine Editions imprint further solidifies its commitment to publishing translated works from global literary scenes.

Granta is consistently acclaimed for the quality of its writing and its international reach. It has been described as a “literary powerhouse” and has won numerous awards for its contributions to literature. Its influence stems from its consistent delivery of high-quality, original, inventive, and provocative writing, and its role in discovering and nurturing new talent. It has shaped literary preferences and trends, making a “significant mark on the literary scene.”

From its humble beginnings as a Cambridge student periodical in 1889, Granta underwent a radical transformation in 1979 under Bill Buford, evolving into a globally recognised literary quarterly. This rebirth was characterised by a bold editorial vision that challenged existing literary norms and championed new voices, particularly from America. Through successive editorial tenures, Granta has consistently adapted its focus, expanding its geographical reach, diversifying its content, and embracing digital platforms, all while maintaining its core commitment to high-quality, passionate storytelling.

Granta‘s enduring success lies in its unwavering “belief in the power and urgency of the story,” a principle that has guided its editorial choices since Buford’s relaunch. Its commitment to publishing “only writing we care passionately about” has ensured consistent quality and originality. Furthermore, its remarkable adaptability—from its format changes to its embrace of global voices and digital innovation—has allowed it to remain relevant across vastly different literary and cultural landscapes.

Granta continues to be a significant force in contemporary literature, not merely reflecting trends but actively shaping them through its thematic issues, its “Best of Young” lists, and its dedication to translated fiction. As the literary world becomes increasingly global and digitally integrated, Granta‘s proactive engagement with these shifts positions it to maintain its influence, fostering new talent and cross-cultural dialogue for generations to come. Its legacy is one of dynamic evolution, proving that a literary institution can honour its past while boldly embracing the future.

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