Graham Sleight (2015) by Francesca Myman
Publishing lead-times being what they are, the extraordinary events of 2020 largely weren’t reflected in the books that came out in the year – or at least, not intentionally. I managed to read a good deal of thought-provoking SF and fantasy this year, but some books seemed even more relevant than expected because of the pandemic-shuttered world they emerged into. How posterity will view them – let alone how it’ll view the books that’ll doubtless follow about COVID itself – is a question for another day.
Samit Basu’s
Chosen Spirits (Simon & Schuster India) offered a picture of India that was, its author insisted, both a dystopia and less bad than some alternatives. It certainly dug into the country’s culture and how it might change under the pressures bearing down on it.
Kamila Shamsie and Nell Stevens to judge 2021 Goldsmiths Prize Fred D’Aguiar and Johanna Thomas-Corr complete the panel for the £10,000 prize for “literature at its most novel”. Stevens, who won the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award for
Mrs Gaskell & Me and lectures at Goldsmiths, University of London, will chair the panel, comprising Shamsie as well as the poet, playwright and novelist Fred D’Aguiar, and the book critic and
Home Fire, a modern-day retelling of the story of Sophocles’s play
Antigone. She is co-vice-president of the council of the Royal Society of Literature. D’Aguiar, a British-Guyanese writer, is a professor of english at the University of California, Los Angeles. His works include five novels and six poetry collections, including the TS Eliot Prize-nominated