Yasmin Zaher: Palestinian writer wins Dylan Thomas prize
Ms Zaher, who was born in Jerusalem in 1991, received the prize at a ceremony in Swansea on Thursday evening."Whittling our exceptional longlist of twelve down to six brilliant books, and then again to just one, was not an easy exercise - yet the judging panel was unanimous in their decision to name debut novelist Yasmin Zaher as the winner," said Namita Gokhale, chair of 2025 judges."Zaher brings complexity and intensity to the page through her elegantly concise writing," she added.The full shortlist for the 2025 prize was:Rapture's Road by Seán Hewitt - poetry collection (UK/Ireland)Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon - novel (Ireland)The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden - novel (The Netherlands)I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson - novel (UK)Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good by Eley Williams - short story collection (UK)
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The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
More sex please, we're bookish: the rise of the x-rated novel
When the judges awarded Yael van der Wouden's brilliant debut, The Safekeep, the Women's prize for fiction last month, they weren't just garlanding a book that happens to have a few sexy scenes in it. They were responding to a work that engages with the current levels of literary excitement around sex and marries this with sweeping historical vistas and a distinctive sensibility. It was joined on the shortlist by Miranda July's exuberant odyssey of midlife desire, All Fours, and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, a smart, quickfire account of a young academic's work for a UN deradicalisation programme, which juxtaposes the world of Middle Eastern religious politics with a closeup relish for female sexuality. While younger generations, at least, have said in recent years that they want to see more platonic friendship and less sex on screen, reading appetites appear to be going in the other direction, with a huge boom in romance and 'romantasy' – the romance-fantasy hybrid driven by TikTok and the success of authors such as Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J Maas. We all have strong, mixed feelings about sex, and the cultural landscape reflects the whole spectrum of kinks and hangups. But that means that we have all the more need for writers like Van der Wouden, July and Sally Rooney, who push the boundaries of how explicit the literary novel can be while also giving us new ways of imagining how desire works within lives today. Ours is a dual age of identity politics and porn. We get our identities from sex – queer or straight, pansexual or 'incel' – but it's also the white-hot arena in which identity melts down. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, when pornography is everywhere and Gillian Anderson is collecting thousands of sexual fantasies with anthropological zeal, it seems we still need literature to tell us new things about sex. What I found, reading recent work by authors including Rooney, Van der Wouden, Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Eimear McBride, were unpredictable fusions of the two impulses. Lovers, dutifully preoccupied with questions of identity by day, find that in bed they can transcend selfhood, outstripping their identities. To surrender individuality and accept the dissolution of the self, to lose sight of who is in control – these possibilities have preoccupied erotic writers since the early 20th century, when sex first became representable in literary fiction. Back then there was DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, staking the redemption of humanity on sexual transformation. In Lawrence's wake came Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Georges Bataille – all about abjection and breaking taboos. Then the outrageously argumentative Norman Mailer and John Updike, whose frank delight in the female form called out for a feminist backlash. It came in the shape of Kate Millett's wittily polemical 1970 Sexual Politics and a new wave of sexually explicit novels by women concerned less with celebrating than with demythologising sex. Erica Jong's epochal 1973 Fear of Flying ushered in the 'zipless fuck' – sex without strings – and allowed a generation of feminists to experiment with promiscuity, but for all its brilliance on psychoanalysis and marriage, the book is pretty terrible on sex. It took another backlash – within feminism itself – to make sex great again. In 1967 Susan Sontag had written The Pornographic Imagination, an essay defending writers such as Bataille from prudery and fighting to classify pornographic writing as literature, even or especially when it exceeded realism. 'Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness,' she wrote – so why not make it a resource for 'breaking through the limits of consciousness'? Angela Carter took on Sontag's ideas in her 1978 study, The Sadeian Woman, arguing against feminists concerned to outlaw porn, and making the case for the 'moral pornographer' – an artist who 'uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders'. Sontag and Carter saw that the power of sex lay in opening selfhood to otherness with extravagant force. Otherness and innovation go together, so great writing about great sex always has radical potential. The parameters they set out still define the best possibilities of what sex writing can be, though plenty of men – from Philip Roth to Michel Houellebecq – came along in the meantime to try to prove that male desire was still fascinating. Reading in our contemporary era, I find myself most riveted by writers who continue Carter's tradition. Published earlier this year, Sophie Kemp's Paradise Logic tells the satirical story of a young woman's attempt to make herself into the ideal girlfriend and, in doing so, exposes the patriarchal nature of porn culture. But precisely because it's so clever and sassy it reveals the limits of satire, whereas other contemporary novelists are bringing together the pornographic and the transcendent in a more transporting way. It's telling that these writers are more often writing gay than heterosexual sex. Garth Greenwell, who has described himself as wanting to write scenes that are '100% pornographic and 100% high art', is more trammelled by questions of identity than Alan Hollinghurst was when he wrote The Swimming-Pool Library – a book Greenwell credits as an inspiration. Greenwell is writing sex in the age of consent and dutiful identity politics, but arguably it's these constraints that power his existential quest. There's a scene in Greenwell's 2020 Cleanness where the pornographic and the transcendent explicitly entwine. The narrator has a BDSM encounter with a Bulgarian man he calls Svetcheto, 'the little saint'. The usually submissive narrator has agreed to dominate. It's a brutal scene, all the more frightening because it mirrors an earlier encounter when the narrator was dangerously violated. We're worried both that he'll reenact that violence and that he won't carry off this new role. But then it becomes clear he's enjoying himself. Suffused by mutual, unexpected transcendence, the couple's porn-inspired identities simultaneously break down and burst into flower. Laughing, Svetcheto licks away the narrator's tears. 'Do you see? You don't have to be like that,' he says. 'You can be like this.' Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Yael van der Wouden write moving, powerful portraits of lesbian desire, full of anatomical detail. Beagin's Big Swiss is a large-hearted tale of a love affair between Flavia, an absurdly beautiful gynaecologist, and Greta, the more klutzy, down-at-heel writer who's paid by Flavia's sex therapist to transcribe her sessions. 'Her pussy looked like advanced origami. A crisp pink lotus flower folded by a master. Greta briefly rearranged it with her mouth.' The sex scenes in Patrick's Mrs S are less metaphorical and more breathlessly desiring, though the prose is taut in its lyricism. It can feel like the plot – a love affair between the 22-year-old new teaching recruit and the headmaster's wife in a girls' boarding school – is an excuse for the sex scenes, but in a way that's the point. In both books, it is striking how quickly sex reveals the existential need for transformation. Even in that first sex scene, Greta feels as if she's reached a place 'she's been visiting in her dreams for years and forgetting'. Mrs S is casually historical – set in the 1980s or 90s – which means its identity politics can be implicit: the narrator wears a chest binder but the book doesn't raise questions of trans identity. Instead it is preoccupied with the loss of identity, as the narrator feels herself remade as the 'You' she becomes in her lover's mouth. 'It is as if she has always been waiting for this arrival, of me into my body. You. I don't have a name. Isn't it so much better, to not have a name, to be dropped straight from the clouds?' The sex scenes are more shocking in Van der Wouden's The Safekeep because the subject matter is so serious. This is the story of a violently sudden passion that becomes a love affair between Eva, a displaced Jew, and Isabel, a gentile woman who has unwitting power over her. The book is set in the aftermath of the second world war and, given the gravity of the material, some reviewers have wondered if the sex scenes are necessary. But this is to miss the point, which is that the book only works if the relationship throws both women entirely off-kilter – using the edges of porn to show sex derailing not only their lives but their selves, and indeed the conventional novel form itself. Isabel finds herself vulnerably, joyously powerless in an unfamiliar body: 'At Eva's mercy, trapped between the cage of her teeth, she had grown a new shape.' Van der Wouden insists that her complex sense of character development justifies sexual explicitness. But she has also been clear in interviews that no justification is needed: 'The girls deserve to have some fun. This was my mantra while writing: Let them have some fun!' So what about those writers daring to write explicit, ecstatic heterosexual sex? The most compelling are Eimear McBride, whose The Lesser Bohemians makes the reader feel as though they are almost inside the bodies of the protagonists, and Sally Rooney, who is casually magisterial at writing sex scenes that are at once radiant and minutely observed by her overthinking characters. Like Greenwell, Rooney balances a commitment to a contemporary vision of identity and consent with a willingness to explore the pull of dissolution and abjection. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In Intermezzo, the young chess genius Ivan checks repeatedly that his lover likes what he's doing, while his brother Peter half-exploits Naomi, a young woman who has sold pornographic images of herself and remains too willing to abase herself for men. But beneath these exterior sexual identities are their private bodily lives, and sex is the best means of growth they have. Rooney follows McBride in dizzyingly contorting her sentences: 'Deep pressing almost hurting and she felt him throbbing, wanting to, and she wanted that also, wet inside, image of silver behind her closed eyelids, jetting, emptying into her …' Rooney is surprised that people don't ask her more often about the place of sex in her novels; 'the erotic is a huge engine in the stories of all my books,' she has said. But it is in All Fours that the full possibilities of Carter's 'moral pornography' are realised. July's novel manages to be at once an ethnographic account of women's perimenopausal sexuality and a more darkly anti-realist tale of a woman living out her sexual fantasies. The narrator spends vast sums transforming a small-town hotel room into a sumptuous dreamscape, where she tests her capacities for love and lust with Davey, a beautiful, potent but determinedly chaste young dancer she meets at the gas station. The encounters with Davey are brilliantly, exuberantly realised – all the more so because July never loses sight of their comedy. In the absence of sex, they seek consummation elsewhere, and at one point Davey changes her tampon. The scene is both bathetically comic, intensely erotic, and unexpectedly moving. But it is once she and Davey part and the narrator has sex with sexagenarian Audra that the novel becomes incandescent. The narrator is home now, adjusting to her former life, but has negotiated a weekly night in the hotel. She seeks out Audra, who had a relationship with Davey years earlier, desperate to compare notes. 'Fantasies are all good and well up to a certain age,' Audra says, 'Then you have to have lived experiences or you'll go batty.' And so Audra describes her sexual past with Davey, while both women masturbate, an experience that, for the narrator, 'lit up new neural pathways, as if sex, the whole concept of it, was being freshly mapped'. As a sexual encounter, this is moving and original. As a vision of womanhood undergoing feats of change and confronting mortality, it's extraordinary. This scene takes us beyond realism. In her life at home, July's narrator is casually, matter-of-factly bound up in the sexual questions of her contemporary world: she has a nonbinary child and is anxiously aware how limited her sex life is by motherhood. But July uses the narrator's experiences in the hotel room to bend and test our sense of novelistic, psychological plausibility. It is a place where identity can be discarded and remade. Sex remains at the centre of much of the best fiction, and we need powerful fictions to show us what sex is or can become. This is where realism comes up against something stranger, and body and consciousness undo and affirm each other, because it can be at once so ordinary, and so transcendent. Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with DH Lawrence (Bloomsbury).
The Guardian
8 hours ago
- The Guardian
Gurnaik Johal: ‘I had no idea Zadie Smith was such a big deal!'
My earliest reading memory I used to regularly reread my bright green copy of the Guinness Book of Records. I can still clearly picture the woman with the longest fingernails in the world. My favourite book growing up I loved the world-building in Michelle Paver's Wolf Brother series. Its stone age setting was different to anything I knew, but so easy to imagine being a part of. The book that changed me as a teenager I bought NW by Zadie Smith because its cover design was so striking. I had no idea she was such a big deal! Once I finished it, I sought out the books that she recommended. That's how I ended up reading Elizabeth Strout, George Saunders and Gustave Flaubert – which was a very good place to start. The writer who changed my mind I didn't read biographies until I stumbled upon Dana Stevens's book about Buster Keaton, Camera Man. She changed my mind about the genre, and now I can't watch Keaton's films without thinking about scenes from the book. The book that made me want to be a writer Reading short stories at university made me want to become a writer. Extra by Yiyun Li, A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri and Recitatif by Toni Morrison stand out as early examples that got me to think differently about reading and writing. The book or author I came back to I didn't get Heart of Darkness at all when I first read it, and was too quick to judge it. Thankfully, I revisited it and now count Joseph Conrad as one of my favourite writers. I love his prose style and the scale of ambition in his novels. The book I reread Teaching courses on the short story allowed me to regularly revisit some favourites. Two stories that never left my syllabus were Pet Milk and Paper Lantern by Stuart Dybek. After dozens of rereads, Dybek's writing always feels new – I get swept along every time. The book I could never read again I listened to Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle while training for a marathon. I think if I read it again, it would invoke some kind of Pavlovian response. The book I discovered later in life I have myself to blame for reading Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe later than I should have – it was on my university course but I missed the lecture. Since reading it, I struggle to get on with novels that don't have any oomph to them. To hold my wavering attention, there's got to be a sense of adventure and play either at the level of the plot or the sentence – Robinson Crusoe has both. The book I am currently reading I'm slowly making my way through Larry McMurtry's epic western Lonesome Dove, which is a comedy of manners set on a cattle drive from Texas to Montana. The free indirect style is very Jane Austen and the dialogue very John Wayne. My comfort read I sometimes take Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries on the tube to work. Dipping in and out of it at random is as close as I can get to meditation during rush hour. Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal is published by Serpent's Tail. To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Sun
2 days ago
- The Sun
Husband of iconic children's book author leaves huge £1.3million fortune to family after his death
THE BELOVED husband of Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson left a £1.3m fortune to his family, it has emerged. Dr Malcolm Donaldson was a paediatric consultant and senior lecturer in child health at the University of Glasgow until his retirement. 3 3 The university later appointed him honorary senior research fellow at its School of Medicine, Dentistry & Nursing. He was married to Julia, whose children's books The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo's Child have been global best-sellers, for 52 years. He passed away aged 75 in September last year, and probate documents revealed he left an estate valued at £1,322,528. A will he prepared in 2020 instructed his fortune should be handed to his family. Julia is the author of over 184 published works and a former Children's Laureate. The Gruffalo was first published in 1999 and has sold more than 13.5m copies. The couple lived in the Glasgow suburb of Bearsden from 1987 until moving to Surrey in 2014. As a highly respected academic, Dr Donaldson wrote or contributed to more than 180 publications, papers and books. But he was also an accomplished actor, singer and guitarist who accompanied his wife to perform her songs and stories at festivals, schools, libraries and bookshops around the world. His younger patients also gave him the affectionate nickname Dr Gruffalo. Brits urged to 'look in loft' as 5 popular 90s toys could make you serious money Tributes were paid to Donaldson after his death. Axel Scheffler, who illustrated the Gruffalo books, said: 'I have known Malcolm for 30 years and always admired his enthusiasm for our books, Julia's work and children's books in general. "All this, besides being a paediatric consultant and giving lectures all over the world. "His true passion was performing with Julia on stage, playing the guitar and acting – especially his legendary suave role of the Fox in The Gruffalo. "He will be deeply missed.' The British Society for Paediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes (BSPED) said: "His contributions will continue to resonate in the field of paediatric endocrinology and child health in the UK, Europe and beyond for many years to come. "His warmth, wisdom and gentle spirit will be deeply missed but forever remembered by all who knew him."
