by Alex Preston
KAMILA SHAMSIE wrote her first novel, In The City by the Sea, while still in college, and it was published in 1998 when she was twenty-five. It was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in the UK, and Shamsie received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature in Pakistan in 1999. Her second novel, Salt and Saffron, followed in 2000, after which she was selected as one of Orange’s Twenty-One Writers of the twenty-first century. Her fifth novel, Burnt Shadows (2009), was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction. Her seventh novel, Home Fire, was longlisted for the 2017 Booker Prize, and in 2018 won the Women’s Prize for Fiction. In 2013 she was included in the Granta list of twenty best young British writers. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
MAX PORTER’s first novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, won the Sunday Times/Peter, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Europese Literatuurprijs and the BAMB Readers’ Award and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. It has been sold in twenty-nine territories. His second novel, Lanny, was published in March 2019. Complicité and Wayward’s production of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, directed by Enda Walsh and starring Cillian Murphy, opened in Dublin in March 2018 and transferred to the Barbican in London in March 2019.
SARA COLLINS is of Jamaican descent and grew up in Grand Cayman. She studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years before doing a Master of Studies in Creative Writing at Cambridge University, where she was the recipient of the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize for Creative Writing. Her first novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, was published to widespread acclaim in 2019.
DAISY JOHNSON was born in 1990 and is a British novelist and short story writer. In 2017, she published the short story collection Fen. Her debut novel, Everything Under, was shortlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize, and she is the youngest nominee in the prize’s history. For her short stories, she has won three awards since 2014.
TASH AW was born in Taipei to Malaysian parents. He grew up in Kuala Lumpur before moving to Britain to attend university. He is the author of four critically acclaimed novels – The Harmony Silk Factory (2005), which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; Map of the Invisible World (2009); Five Star Billionaire (2013) and We, The Survivors (2019) – and a work of non-fiction, The Face: Strangers on a Pier (2016), finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. His novels have twice been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and been translated into twenty-three languages. His work has won an O. Henry Prize and been published in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, A Public Space and the landmark Granta 100, amongst others. He is also a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.
PETER FRANKOPAN is Professor of Global History at Oxford University, where he is also Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, and Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. His book Silk Roads went to number one in the Sunday Times Non-Fiction charts, remaining in the Top Ten for nine months in a row, as well as being number one in China, India and many other countries around the world. His follow-up, The New Silk Roads, is a ‘masterly mapping out of a new world order’, according to the Evening Standard. In December 2018, The Silk Roads was chosen as one of the twenty-five most influential books translated into Chinese in the last forty years.
YAN GE was born in 1984 in Sichuan, and currently lives in Dublin. She recently completed a PhD in Comparative Literature at Sichuan University and is the chairperson of the China Young Writers Association. People’s Literature magazine recently chose her – in a list reminiscent of the New Yorker’s ‘Twenty under forty’ – as one of China’s twenty future literary masters, and in 2012 she was chosen as Best New Writer by the prestigious Chinese Literature Media Prize. Yan Ge was a guest writer at the Netherlands Crossing Borders Festival in The Hague, November 2012, and since then has appeared at numerous literary festivals in Europe. Her novel The Chilli Bean Paste Clan was published in Chinese in May 2013 by Zhejiang Literature Press, and has been translated into German, French and several other languages.
LAWRENCE OSBORNE is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Forgiven, The Ballad of a Small Player, Hunters in the Dark, Beautiful Animals, and six books of non-fiction. He is the third writer, after John Banville (writing as Benjamin Black) and Robert B. Parker, to be asked by the Raymond Chandler Estate to write a new Philip Marlowe novel. Osborne lives in Bangkok.
KATHARINE KILALEA grew up in South Africa and moved to the UK to study for an M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her debut poetry collection, One Eye’d Leigh (2009), was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Katharine’s debut novel, OK, Mr Field, was published in early June 2018 by Faber & Faber, and in the US in early July 2018 by Tim Duggan Books.
MICHAEL DONKOR was born in London in 1985. He was raised in a Ghanaian household where talking lots and reading lots were vigorously encouraged. Michael worked in publishing for a number of years, but eventually decided to put his literary enthusiasms to other uses: in 2010, he retrained as an English teacher. Since then he has taught A-Level English, trying to develop a curious excitement about books and storytelling within his students. In 2014 Michael was selected by Writers Centre Norwich for their Inspires Mentoring Scheme, and worked with mentor Daniel Hahn. His first novel, Hold, which explores Ghanaian heritage and questions surrounding sexuality, identity and sacrifice, was published by 4th Estate in July 2018.
BENJAMIN MARKOVITS grew up in Texas, London, Oxford and Berlin. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study the Romantics – an experience he wrote about in Playing Days, a novel. He has published seven novels, including Either Side of Winter, about a New York private school, and a trilogy on the life of Lord Byron: Imposture, A Quiet Adjustment and Childish Loves. Granta selected him as one of the Best of Young British Novelists in 2013. In 2016, his novel You Don’t Have To Live Like This was awarded the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction.
ALEX PRESTON is an award-winning novelist and journalist. He is the author of three novels, most recently the critically acclaimed In Love and War, as well as a bestselling literary history of birds, As Kingfishers Catch Fire. His short stories have appeared several times in the Best British Short Stories anthology. He writes regularly for the Observer, the Telegraph and Harper’s Bazaar.
SARAH CHURCHWELL is Professorial Fellow in American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her books include The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2004), Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby (2013) and Behold America – A History of America First and the American Dream. Churchwell appears regularly on television and radio and is the director of the Being Human Festival.
EDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FIRSTLY, I’d like to thank the authors. Editing this collection has enabled me to commission a group of absurdly gifted writers and the experience of working with this diverse and distinguished group has been truly memorable. It’s been wonderful to get to know the team at Splendid Communications; they have lived up to their name every step of the way and have been hugely supportive of the creative process. It’s an honour to work with Canongate, one of the best publishers around, and proudly independent to boot! The design of the book is breathtaking and Here Design and Andy Lovell have made the object as beautiful as its contents. Miriam Robinson should have her name on the cover – she has done so much to bring this book together and has been a rich source of advice and wisdom throughout. Finally, I wanted to thank The Balvenie – for conceiving of this project, for their support and input, for believing in the power of stories. I’ll finish off by raising a wee dram to all of you and, given that I’m half-Scottish, a quiet slàinte mhath.
ex Preston, Pursuit