Tag: International Dylan Thomas Prize
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Surviving solitude in Caleb Azumah Nelson’s ‘Small Worlds’
Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Small Worlds is a celebration of love, music, and community. Through jazz, dance, and shared experiences, the novel explores the beauty of connection and the pain of isolation. With lyrical prose, Nelson reminds us that to be ‘open’ is to be free—and that small worlds sustain us.
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Language and the queer journey in Arinze Ifeakandu’s ‘God’s Children Are Little Broken Things’
Arinze Ifeakandu‘s God’s Children Are Little Broken Things (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2022) won the International Dylan Thomas Prize in 2023. It’s a collection of nine short stories set in Nigeria—in Abuja and Kano, mostly—all of which have male queer stories at the heart. In none of the stories is being queer straightforward. Sometimes the difficulties…
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Archiving grief: Patricia Lockwood’s ‘No One Is Talking About This’
Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (Bloomsbury, 2021) won last year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize, and was cited especially for its depiction of the Internet. In the book, the ‘portal’ is a virtual world that can provide access to ‘everywhere’, but is a largely desensitised space; it is where the protagonist spends…
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Top 5 blogs of 2020
The new year will soon be heralded by new blogs from me. But for now, here’s a list of my Top 5 blogs of 2020 according to views. Apart from anything else, the list provides an interesting snapshot of last year’s popular and thought-provoking books … Enjoy, and thanks for reading this blog in 2020!…
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(Post-)postmodernist elegy: Stephen Sexton’s ‘If All the World and Love Were Young’
Stephen Sexton’s If All The World and Love Were Young (Penguin, 2019) has proven phenomenally successful, having won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and being shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. And yet, it is not an easy poetry collection, proving both difficult in terms of its style and allusive references, and…
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Personal politics and the modern English language: Mary Jean Chan’s ‘Flèche’
There’s too much to praise in Mary Jean Chan’s Flèche: the characterful depths it presents of its persona, the problems they encounter with queer becoming, the gentle lyricism that appears straightforward but is anything but. It is about family, about love—and also about fencing. Of the topics that I could cover, I’m going to examine…