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Piyumi Kapugeekiyana’s tale explores repatriation and cultural ownership through a replica of the goddess Tārā
• Read the winning story: The Original Is Not Here
A story exploring cultural ownership through the eyes of a museum curator has won this year’s 4thWrite prize.
Piyumi Kapugeekiyana was announced as the winner of the prize at a ceremony in London on Wednesday evening.
The Essex Serpent author offers a moving account of her father-in-law’s final illness that will resonate widely
The novelist Sarah Perry’s father-in-law, David, died of oesophageal cancer in 2022. This book tells the story of his dying, from the last time she saw him well, on a trip to Great Yarmouth at the end of summer, to his death less than two months later, just nine days after being diagnosed.
It’s not easy to account for what makes this book so special. Its main character is as unpromisingly ordinary as its title suggests, and some may even find him a little boring. David Perry is the kind of man who spends hours sorting his beloved stamp collection into albums with the aid of long-tipped forceps and magnifying glasses, or filling in his Sudoku puzzle books, or reading the latest copy of the Antiques Gazette, looking intently at porcelain dogs and chased silver punch-bowls.
A new platform will be an alternative to Kindle, and bookshops will earn 100% of the profit from sales
The online store Bookshop.org is launching a platform through which independent bookshops in the UK will be able to sell ebooks as an alternative to Amazon’s Kindle offering.
Independent bookshops will earn 100% of the profit from sales, and ebooks will be priced the same as they are on Amazon.
Brown’s story of a teenage life ‘critically damaged in a moment’ was the ‘unanimous’ pick for the £15,000 prize
• Read an extract from the story below
Doncaster-born writer Colwill Brown has won this year’s BBC national short story award for a “heartbreaking” entry about shame and the long-term effects of trauma, told in South Yorkshire dialect.
Brown was announced as the winner of the £15,000 award, run in collaboration with Cambridge University, at a ceremony held at BBC Broadcasting House on Tuesday evening.
The 88-year-old’s jaunty whodunnit, set during the prohibition era, features clowns, Nazis and a missing cheese heiress
Everything is connected in Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon’s fleet-footed noir fiction about a lindy-hopping detective in prohibition-era Wisconsin. The homemade bomb connects to the runaway cheese heiress, the cheese heiress to the federal agents, and the feds to the pro‑Nazi leagues at the bowling lanes outside town. Early-30s Milwaukee, in turn, is connected to powder-keg central Europe, where paramilitary groups have pitched camp on the Hungaro-Croatian border and guest speakers wax lyrical about “our immense fascist future”. Most likely it connects to the current moment as well, albeit wryly and slyly, with a nonchalant swing. That’s the implied final move of this merry dance of a book: the point where the past links its hands with the present.
Shadow Ticket is a Pynchon novel – the 88-year-old’s first in 12 years; his ninth overall – and so it naturally connects to the man’s back catalogue, too, and its abiding fascination with conspiracy, chaos and the churn of American pop culture. Specifically it relates back to his two previous works – Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge – in that the story comes tailored as a dime-store whodunnit, complete with red herrings, plot twists and reams of hard-boiled dialogue. But classifications, like people, are never entirely to be trusted. Pynchon inhabits the genre like a hermit crab inside a mollusc shell, periodically peeking out from the gloom to remind us that he’s there.
SenLinYu’s debut started life as Harry Potter fanfiction. The Alchemised author shares why they were drawn to a war-torn love story, how a conservative upbringing shaped their writing, and the snobbery around fanfiction
In recent days, bookish pockets of TikTok and Instagram have been talking about one thing only. “I’ve been looking forward to this day more than I look forward to my wedding day,” says one creator, holding up to the camera a copy of the 1,040-page novel that was Penguin’s most pre-ordered debut of the year and has already netted a potentially record-breaking seven-figure film rights deal.
How does a first-time novelist get out of the starting blocks quite like that? The thing is, the author behind the doorstopper dark fantasy novel, Alchemised, is no unknown debut: SenLinYu, 34, started off writing Harry Potter fanfiction that blew up online during the pandemic, racking up more than 20m downloads. Her Draco and Hermione (“Dramione”) fanfic, heavily inspired by The Handmaid’s Tale, has now been rewritten – with third-party IP necessarily removed – and published traditionally as Alchemised. But if you didn’t know about Alchemised’s origins, you would be unlikely to clock them: even squinting, it’s hard to see any trace of Harry Potter in the revamped version, set in a different world and magic system.
A strange, humorous, mysterious window out of trauma is both desolate and decorative
An Explanation of Doily
(for Adam Zagajewski)
You asked me last summer: ‘What is a doily?’
Sometimes, at lunch, I walk on the beach.
Today I was coatless. A storm cloud threatened,
dark as a spaceship. Should it pour,
a sister ship down in the water
would throw up grappling nets to the surface,
rain rise to soak me. Behind a sandbank,
waves touched the shore, no more than a shimmer.
A love affair between two men in Darjeeling comes to a violent end in this unfocused tale of heartbreak, secrecy – and the separate lives they return to in Mumbai
Mahesh Rao’s third novel tells the story of two young men, Neville and Pavan, as their paths cross and recross in the years preceding India’s 2018 decriminalisation of homosexuality. It is a rather melancholy tale, in which the sky is always grey and the mood is always despondent, where secrecy and shame are the prevailing emotions, and violence is never far away. As gay men in pre-2018 India, Neville and Pavan exist in an in-between world. There are dating apps and hookups galore, but there is also open hostility and the threat of prosecution. Tempering this bleakness is Rao’s pleasingly wry humour and sharply satirical eye, which he casts over this period of cultural flux. The narrative is split into two sections – Darjeeling in 2014 and Mumbai in 2018 – proceeding in short chapters that alternate between Neville’s and Pavan’s points of view.
The story begins as a landslide blocks the routes to and from the Golden Peaks Hotel, a subpar establishment in the hills of Darjeeling where Pavan works and where Neville, along with his haughty mother Audrey and servile family friend Lorna, is a guest. With little else to do, and emboldened by the novel circumstances, the two men strike up a furtive romance. “[Pavan’s] sense of the world being held in suspension had continued to grow. The hotel was cut off. Rations were low. Routines had changed. There seemed to be a fated quality about his encounter with Neville.”
Unwritten rules, social contracts, shared logic – and what happens when they fall apart
Knots, RD Laing’s 1970 book, was a collection of short dialogues illustrating the tangle of projection and misreading that characterises human encounters. The radical psychiatrist made clear the influence of unacknowledged baggage, the conscious or unconscious laying of traps for the other speaker, and helped us see more clearly the pitfalls of even our most routine conversations. In an era like ours, where global relations can contain as much psychodrama as private ones, Laing’s Zen-like exchanges have more than just individual pertinence.
The contrast between Laing’s absurdist, tragicomic sensibility and Steven Pinker’s crisp reasonableness is obvious. But there is more common ground than we might at first think. Pinker illustrates his arguments with piquant little dialogues, some of them worthy of Laing (“You hang up first”. “No, you hang up first.” “Okay.” “She hung up on me!”); this book is as lively an exposition of cognitive science as you are likely to find.
My vision was based on sharing, not exploitation – and here’s why it’s still worth fighting for
I was 34 years old when I first had the idea for the world wide web. I took every opportunity to talk about it: pitching it in meetings, sketching it out on a whiteboard for anyone who was interested, even drawing the web in the snow with a ski pole for my friend on what was meant to be a peaceful day out.
I relentlessly petitioned bosses at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), where I worked at the time, who initially found the idea “a little eccentric” but eventually gave in and let me work on it. I was seized by the idea of combining two pre-existing computer technologies: the internet and hypertext, which takes an ordinary document and brings it to life by adding “links”.