The Royal Society of Literature (RSL) celebrates and supports writing of all kinds. The Ondaatje prize is an annual award of £10,000 for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place. Read on for this year’s shortlist…
Falling Animals by Sheila Armstrong (book available)
On an isolated beach set against a lonely, windswept coastline, a pale figure sits serenely against a sand dune staring out to sea. Months later, after a fruitless investigation, the nameless stranger is buried in an unmarked grave. But the mystery of his life and death lingers on, drawing the nearby villagers into its wake. From strandings to shipwrecks, it is not the first time that strangeness has washed up on their shores. Told through a chorus of voices, ‘Falling Animals’ follows the crosshatching threads of lives both true and imagined, real and surreal, past and present.
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad (book and ebook available)
After years away from her family’s homeland, and healing from an affair with an established director, stage actress Sonia Nasir returns to Palestine to visit her older sister Haneen. Though the siblings grew up spending summers at their family home in Haifa, Sonia hasn’t been back since the second intifada and the deaths of her grandparents. While Haneen stayed and made a life commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university, Sonia remained in London to focus on her burgeoning acting career and now dissolute marriage. On her return, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new. Once at Haneen’s, Sonia meets the charismatic and candid Mariam, a local director, and finds herself roped into a production of Hamlet in the West Bank.
A Flat Place by Noreen Masud (book available)
Noreen Masud has always loved flatlands. Her earliest memory is of a wide, flat field glimpsed from the back seat of her father’s car in Lahore. As an adult in Britain she’s discovered many more flat landscapes to love: Orford Ness, Morecambe Bay, the Cambridgeshire Fens, Orkney. These bare, haunted expanses remind her of the flat place inside herself: the place created by trauma. Noreen suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder: the product of a profoundly disrupted and unstable childhood. It flattens her emotions, blanks out parts of her memory, and colours her world with anxiety. Undertaking a pilgrimage around Britain’s flatlands, seeking solace and belonging, she weaves her impressions of the natural world with poetry, folklore and history, and with recollections of her own early life.
Cuddy by Benjamin Myers (book available)
Travelling through the wilderness, a young woman has visions of a cathedral on a hill. The downtrodden wife of an archer seeks the truth in stone walls, in meadows full of garlic flowers. A group of soldiers sit out their last hours before their death under a vaulted ceiling. The professor receives unwelcome night-time visitors. A young man bids his dying mother goodbye, and sets off on his first day of work as a labourer. From these seeds of historical truth and strange mythology, Benjamin Myers spins an unforgettable story of love and loss that breaks free of realism, entering a thrilling space both hilarious and terrifying. Unfolding over centuries, deploying a panoply of voices, Cuddy is written with Myers’ inimitable humour, pathos and grace – and confirms him as one of the most important writers of his generation.
No Man’s Land by David Nash
‘No Man’s Land’ is the debut collection of poems by Chile-based Irish poet David Nash, an exploration and a reclamation of a place at once familiar and strange – the rural landscape of the poet’s formative years. Returning for the first time in over a decade, Nash re-immerses himself in a world of memory and language, folklore and custom, revealing a strikingly intimate connection with flora and fauna, land- and seascape. Yet all the while, his presence feels questioned, undeserved, his calling as both participant and observer under assault from the passage of time and the overwhelming threat of the present ecological moment.
Fassbinder, Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman (book and ebook available)
A kaleidoscopic study of the late West German film maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982). Written quickly under a self-imposed deadline in the spirit of Fassbinder himself, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, ‘Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors’ presents the filmmaker as a pivotal figure in the late 1970s moment between late modernism and the advent of postmodernism and the digital revolution. Compelling, beautifully written and genuinely moving, echoing the fragmentary and reflective works of writers like Barthes and Cioran, this is a story that has everything: sex, drugs, art, the city, cinema and revolution.
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