‘Kick the Latch’ came out 2022. It’s winning awards now
Kathryn Scanlan’s slim novel “Kick the Latch” didn’t arrive with a massive media push when it was published in 2022, but both book and author continue to defy expectations.
Over the course of a single week this year, the Los Angeles-based writer was the recipient of both the £10,000 Gordon Burn Prize and one of this year’s Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes, which comes with an astounding $175,000 award.
“It’s shocking. I was not expecting that,” says Scanlan, who spoke by phone from her Silverlake home. “I think it was a span of a week that I found out about both of them. So that was crazy.”
“It still hasn’t really sunk in yet. It seems surreal,” she says with a laugh. “It was a weird week, a nice week.”
In “Kick the Latch,” the narrator, a woman named Sonia, tells stories about her life, which has largely been spent around horses.
In Scanlan’s skilful telling (it’s based on interviews she did with a former racehorse trainer in Iowa), the sections are brief, captivating and potent, revealing Sonia’s insights about the animals and the peculiarities (and dangers) of the racetrack community. Even the most painful stories are delivered with an economy that can be devastating.
“The first conversation … was about four hours long. And so after that, I transcribed it and then I had this big text document,” says Scanlan about her time with Sonia. “Right away, I just started playing around with it just to see what I could do with it. And so I started just cutting and pasting sections of it into individual Word documents and kind of working on those, playing around with those and rewriting them in some instances.
“A lot of it was a question of editing, of trying to bring out what I thought was really interesting about a particular anecdote or scene or vignette or story,” she says. “It was a process of starting with the original raw material and then over years just working it into this short form.
“I like it when you can sort of see it all at once or maybe see a block of text on a page and have that kind of control over it and shape it almost like it’s an object or an artwork,” says Scanlan, who studied painting and writing and whose husband is a painter.
One of my own favourite sections of the book concerns the story of a woman known as Bicycle Jenny (which I won’t explain so you can discover it on your own). Scanlan lights up as she recalls hearing Sonia tell it.
“When she told me that story, I just loved it so much,” says Scanlan. “I sort of sat up a little bit and was like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is a book.”
These days, Scanlan says she’s at work on something new, though it’s too soon to talk about. Still, she’s pleased about the continued interest in “Kick the Latch.”