Hyper-contemporary literature: brand-new writing
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‘Clear’ by Carys Davies: winning the language-game
Nothing much happens in Clear (2024), Carys Davies’s second novel to have won Wales Book of the Year.1 Ivar lives on a remote Scottish island, perhaps closer to Norway than mainland Scotland, and tends to his cow, his horse, and to the land. In nineteenth century Scotland, John Ferguson is sent to invite him to…
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Linguicide and freedom: Percival Everett’s ‘James’
It was ‘my language,’ says our hero James, that ‘had so disturbed and frightened’ Judge Thatcher, the White slaver.1 But it was neither James’s profanity (which is non-existent), nor his angry delivery, that shocks the Judge. Instead, it’s James’s ability to speak conventional American-English. Up to this point the Judge, like all other White characters…
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No pain, no poetry: nostalgia in Karen Solie’s ‘Wellwater’ and Vidyan Ravinthiran’s ‘Avidya’
For the first time, in 2025 the Forward Prize for Poetry was jointly awarded. From an initial glance, Karen Solie’s Wellwater—which also won the 2025 T.S. Eliot Prize—and Vidyan Ravinthiran’s Vidya have little in common. Wellwater charts the speaker’s memories of growing up in ?Edmonton, Canada, whilst also reckoning with the damage the anthropocene is…
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A new atrocity: C.D. Rose’s ‘We Live Here Now’
This blog post is more ‘thought experiment’ than ‘thought through’. Let’s see whether it works. C.D. Rose’s We Live Here Now (Melville House, 2024) won the 2025 Goldsmiths Prize for experimental fiction. It comprises fifteen chapters, the stories of which are not told strictly chronologically—’They could we think later, be seen in any sequence.’—that all…
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A new Beckett? Yasmin Zaher’s ‘The Coin’ and dispossession
Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel The Coin (Footnote Press, 2024) was praised by the 2025 Dylan Thomas Prize jury for ‘dissect[ing] nature and civilisation, beauty and justice, class and belonging in a vivid exploration of identity and heritage’.1 It was the jury’s unanimous choice. In its depiction of the narrator’s life in New York, the city…
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Gizzi the space man: Peter Gizzi’s ‘Fierce Elegy’
In Fierce Elegy (2023), Peter Gizzi’s 2025 T.S. Eliot prize-winning collection of poetry, the poet does many astounding things. These include his use of form, the contiguous suturing of images, and—as I will briefly show—his elaboration of space. Spatial forebear While I was reading Fierce Elegy I was reminded of the early modern English poet,…
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