Tag: feminism
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The true reality of dreams in Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’
In 2024, South Korea’s Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature. As a 54-year-old author of eleven novels—only five of which have been translated into English—Han was viewed by some as an unexpected choice. The Swedish Academy—awarders of the Nobel Prize—praised Han ‘for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the…
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The afterlife in Rachel Cusk’s ‘Parade’
Rachel Cusk’s *Parade* (2024) intertwines stories of a painter named ‘G.’ and various women confronting life’s adversities. The novel’s fragmented structure reflects on themes of identity and gender. It coincidentally parallels Maurice Blanchot’s *The Instant of My Death*. Both works explore ‘death-in-life’—one of Cusk’s narrators grapples with her split self, while Blanchot’s protagonist experiences a…
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Mirror mirror: the ‘reverso’ poem in Kim Moore’s ‘All the Men I Never Married’
All night a bird beats its wingsbehind the wall. In the space between roomsit has the quietest scream. (I realise I cannot livewithout desire.) At first I think it’s trappedbehind the wall. Is it another birdthat moves, that seems to fall and rise again?I am hiding somethingin the mirror. In the morningI am searching for…
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Dancing the night away: Joelle Taylor’s ‘C+nto & Othered Poems’
Joelle Taylor’s C+nto & Othered Poems (The Westbourne Press, 2021) won the 2022 T.S. Eliot Prize. It offers a searing history of butch culture in the 1980s and after, with both tragedy, epiphany, and liberation tracking across its 121 pages. It is a collection that stores tragedy at its core, especially in the magisterial scene…
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‘Judge for Yourself: Reading Hyper-contemporary literature and book prize shortlists’
‘Judge for Yourself’ is published on 5 October 2020.
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Anne Enright’s ‘Actress’ (part 2): the age of consent
In my first blog on Anne Enright’s Actress (Jonathan Cape, 2020), I connected it with the late Irish poet Eavan Boland (1944–2020) through the search for a female genealogy. Or, in simpler terms, both Norah in Actress and Boland in her prose and poetry are looking for their mothers. In this blog, I again read…