Ali Smith visits Foyles to speak to the joint winners of the Weatherglass Novella Prize, Jupiter Jones and Anju GastonAbout this Event
The Weatherglass Novella Prize is an international literary competition, judged by award-winning author Ali Smith.
Ali Smith is a highly acclaimed Scottish author, playwright, and journalist known for her experimental, playful, and deeply humanistic fiction. Often described as 'Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting', she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize four times and has won major awards including the Goldsmiths Prize, the Costa Novel Award, and the Women's Prize for Fiction.
Jupiter Jones is the winner of the Philip Hoare Prize for creative non-fiction and the Colm Toibin International Short Story Prize. She is the author of three previous novellas: The Death and Life of Mrs Parker, Lovelace Flats; and Gull Shit Alley and Other Roads to Hell.
Jupiter's novella The Hyena's Daughter tells the story of a 19th Century sisterhood, the daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft: Fanny Imlay and Mary Shelley, the famed writer of Frankenstein, plus their step-sister Claire Clairmont, lover of Lord Byron. It features their connection to Percy Bysshe Shelley and many of the other contemporary poets and thinkers of the time.
Pacy and assured, it turns its history to life from fragment to sensuous fragment. If the dead brought to life is to be Mary Shelley’s theme, this novella asks what the real source of life spirit is, the vital spark. This book, full of detail and richesse, is a piece of vitality in itself.
Anju Gaston was born in Hiroshima and raised in rural Devon. She holds degrees from the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford. Pink Soap is her debut work of fiction.
Anju's novella Pink Soap asks: how do we piece our lives back together? A young woman has a psychotic episode, during which she offends and alienates everyone in her life. She desperately needs to start again but has no idea how. Her friends try to help but it’s not enough: her life seems strange to her, the episode hangs over everything she does. She flies to Japan to meet her estranged father – but there are so many barriers: their past shared and unshared, language, unspoken truths.
What must she do to re-make her life?
It is a devastating, spare and darkly funny exploration of mania, recon- ciliation – and how to live a life when that life is seemingly no longer yours.
Your ticket includes a complimentary glass of wine.
*Please note that the Auditorium at Foyles is fully accessible from the Ground floor lifts.Tickets: £10 General Admission, £8 Foyalty Member
Venue: The Auditorium (Level 6) at Foyles, 107 Charing Cross Road*
Event Venue
Foyles, 107 Charing Cross Road, London, United Kingdom
GBP 8.00 to GBP 10.00
