Booker prize nominee started novel on her phone
A DEBUT novelist has been shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize for a book she began writing on her mobile phone on the way to work.
British writer Fiona Mozley, 29, is nominated for Elmet, described by judges as “timeless in its epic mixture of violence and love”.
Mozley sits alongside literary heavyweights Ali Smith and Mohsin Hamid for this year’s award and began writing Elmet, set in the copses of Yorkshire, on a train from York, where she had been visiting family and where she grew up, to London, where she worked.
The first chapter was written as the Yorkshire landscape passed her by at 100mph. The author previously said that she kept her writing secret from friends because it spurred her on. “I did not want to set myself up for a fall. I didn’t want to expect it to be published,” the author, who worked for a literary agency in London, told the Evening Standard. I thought, if I didn’t tell my friends I was writing it I’d be more likely to finish. So I just got on with it.”
The result, Elmet, has been described as a “forceful” and “tremendously potent” first novel, which is “also timely” on the “doomed resistance to the encouragement of an ever more faceless world”.
Seen through the eyes of a child, Elmet is the story of a philosophical bareknuckle fighter who brings up his children “in defiance of social norms”.