Lola Seaton

Nov 6, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Lola Seaton

The Goldsmiths Prize was established a decade ago to celebrate a quality in contemporary novels that (oddly, given the name) is not especially common: novelty. Indeed the “novel” is a bit of a misnomer: breaking new formal ground – repurposing or discarding existing conventions, discovering or imposing fresh ones – is, among modern practitioners, by no means a universal impulse.

Oct 29, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Lola Seaton

Jonathan Buckley was born in Birmingham in 1956 and grew up in Dudley. He studied English at Sussex University, then at King’s College London, where he specialised in the work of the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay. Buckley is the author of 12 novels and is drawn, as he puts it, to the “polyphonic, multi-faceted, episodic, fragmentary form”. His first, The Biography of Thomas Lang, published in 1997, was told in the form of letters between Lang’s brother and his would-be biographer.

Oct 22, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Lola Seaton

Born in 1967, Mark Bowles grew up between Bradford and Leeds, and studied English at Liverpool and Oxford universities. He lives in south-east London, where he teaches at a secondary school. His first novel, All My Precious Madness, published in September by Galley Beggar Press, is a relentlessly intelligent and entertaining monologue: the musings, reminiscences and fulminations – often foul-mouthed – of Henry Nash, a London-based academic raised, like Bowles, near Bradford.

Sep 19, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Lola Seaton

Sally Rooney’s fourth novel is not exactly her best, nor likely to be her best loved. In her last book, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021), a character – fresh from reading Henry James – enthuses: “Have you ever read such a juicy novel?” It’s not a question most readers of her new one will come away exclaiming. But if Intermezzo is not Rooney’s juiciest novel, it is her meatiest.

Aug 29, 2024 | nybooks.com | Lola Seaton

The Irish columnist Megan Nolan began writing fiction under the spell of Karl Ove Knausgaard. She read little else while starting her first novel, Acts of Desperation (2021). Nolan is hardly a newcomer to self-exposure: her columns and personal essays, animated by breezy, humane candor, tackle intimate subjects light and heavy—often sex, romance, and drinking (“all the things I love most,” as the Nolan-like narrator of Acts of Desperation remarks at one point).