Anyone fancy a Creative Hour this Sunday?
Also: miscellaneous bits and bobs, including my thoughts on Close to Home by Michael Magee.
I’ve been a bit off-radar for the last two weeks, mainly because my laptop has been at laptop hospital. Thanks to the Geniuses (job title), it’s back now, and my book edits are calling to me. I’ll be online from 5pm to 6pm UK time this Sunday 4 February for a Creative Hour, and would love you to join me on Google Meet to get some of your own work done. Here’s a helpful timezone converter in case you’re not on UK time. I’ll send out the link to paying subscribers early on Sunday.
After that, the next Creative Hour will likely be on Sunday 25 February, if you want to pop that into your diary. This reminds me that I really enjoyed my friend
’s Pen Friend newsletter this week about British idioms, and why we’re all contorting ourselves not to use language that’s too demanding or self-important.
Do check out Pen Friend if you haven’t already. As Helen Rumbelow, another talented journalist recently wrote to me (and she doesn’t know Hannah personally, so is more impartial), ‘Hannah is just casually bashing out these Paris-Review-updated-for-2024 gems – I mean, she’s kind of a genius? The art work? It’s amazing.’
It is, and she is, although I don’t know if she’d be able to fix your laptop.
This week, Close to Home by Michael Magee was announced as the Debut Fiction category winner of the Nero Book Awards – a category for which I was on the judging panel. Here I am with my fellow judges, bookseller Tom Robinson and novelist Sara Collins, looking very pleased with ourselves after making the decision. I never know what to do with my hands in photos. I’ve accidentally gone very twee.
I love this novel. It’s about Sean, who has graduated from university and come home to Belfast, and instead of springing off into his promising future, has slipped back into quicksand. There’s this gluey poverty and familiarity that’s restricting him: a cold, damp flat; nights out that escalate into fights; trauma all around him, in loyal, volatile friends and family; crap jobs and, soon, community service. It’s so honest about how ‘social mobility’ works, or doesn’t in the UK at the moment, and how so many people live – people we don’t hear from enough in fiction.
I get very tired, on the other hand, of hearing from privileged people on the right about personal responsibility, as if they have any experience at all of pulling themselves out of debt and dysfunction without help – so I’m grateful for this story that explores what that actually takes. It’s funny in parts, it’s never hysterical or maudlin, and I loved Sean and was desperately hopeful for him. It’s an excellent book, a deserving winner, and you should buy it.
Today it’s my wonderful mother’s birthday. My mum is [AGE REDACTED], born in Wales though she has lived in England all of her adult life, and she wants to go and see All of Us Strangers with me. ‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘Apparently even the film critics sobbed all the way through. Is that really what you want to do on your birthday?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘What better than a real Welsh weep?’
This is a woman who doesn’t like to wallow in things day to day, but does like to listen to Welsh choral music on her drive from London to Swansea, and sing along and cry.
So we’re off to see the very sad film now. I hope to see you on Sunday! Until then, good luck with your writing.
PS Happy Birthday to your mother. My great-grandad was Welsh, we go back to Rhossili 1520. And earlier. X
I'm up for a Creative Writing Hour - or I will be - pre dawn or dawnish here in Aotearoa New Zealand.
I'm so pleased about Michael Magee and would love to read his book.
Like you, I feel sad and frustrated by those who think equal outcome is equally obtainable. Equal opportunity to me means shelter, food, and paying the bills without stress.
On that note, I gave a coin to a homeless man the other day. He wanted to hug and I declined explaining I don't hug any stranger, I'm just not that touch safe, but we had a virtual hug. Then he ran up to my car, motioning for me to wind down the window. My son was in the passenger seat and homeless man addressed him, advising my son to study, 'to not turn out like me'. 'You are a good man,' I said, tearing up. 'Good and kind.'
When I worked as a young reporter in Europe thanks to an amazing Paris-based scholarship, I always interviewed the poor - the people of the streets, the people of the fields. I learned so much from them.
Whether a country is successful or not is best gauged by interviewing not those at the top but those who live on the ground.