Tag: Wales Book of the Year
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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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‘The Outsider’ redux: Nadifa Mohamed’s ‘The Fortune Men
Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men (Viking, 2021) won the Wales Book of the Year in 2022. It is a fictional retelling of the tragic miscarriage of justice of Somali Mahmood Mattan in 1950s Cardiff. In the book, Mattan is executed for the murder of British Jew Violet Volacki, a crime he strenuously denied. While the…