KEVIN JARED HOSEIN
‘My novel, Hungry Ghosts, revolves around two families in 1940s Trinidad – an untamed time of violence and uncertainty on this island. Dalton Changoor and his young wife, Marlee, live on a large, isolated estate; Hans and Shweta Saroop live in a dilapidated barrack with their son, Krishna. They sleep on uncomfortable straw beddings and have cockroaches in their food bags. The story kicks off after Dalton suddenly vanishes and ransom notes start to arrive. But Marlee refuses to pay her husband’s ransom – she’s happy he’s gone.
‘The problem now? It seems he was involved in some nefarious activities and shadowy figures have appeared around the estate. Broken windows, dead animals, more ransom notes. So Marlee hires Hans to act as nightwatch. He suddenly finds himself sipping Ceylon tea and sleeping on a clean chenille bedspread. How can he return to his previous life? And what happens when danger looms closer and closer to both the barrack and estate? How do you escape a life that suddenly feels like torture? And who are you willing to sacrifice for another existence?
‘The seed for this book was planted when I was commissioned to do an article for a magazine. I decided to interview elders from my childhood village. I was curious as to why we, village children, were warned not to play with the kids from the squatter settlement that sat on the bushy fringes. We had all come up with ghastly Boo Radley-esque rumours about the people there – kidnapping, dismemberment and black magic. In the end, the only answer I could get was, “Their parents was never no good. So their children probably worse.” It’s a prejudice with a long and complex history, and it was fascinating to explore it in this novel.
‘I was a full-time science teacher when writing the novel.
At free periods in the staffroom, I’d quickly type ideas and all kinds of word vomit into a Word document. On the weekends, I refined and edited. I also like to drive around Trinidad and take photos and use them as imagery references. My laptop’s R and T keys stopped working midway through (those are two important letters!). Luckily, I won Teacher of the Month when that happened and the school serendipitously gifted me a wired keyboard. So now I have a keyboard atop a keyboard! I have a desk I like to write on, but I edit while in bed.
‘If I had to offer a piece of writing advice, I’d say always come with your bowl empty. No matter how much you think you know about a subject or how much experience you may have, it’s always good to receive knowledge as well. It’s something I learnt as a science teacher – let’s test all these hypotheses together. It’s stressful to behave like you know everything all the time. It can be surprisingly calming to simply listen, even if your opinion differs. And you may find something moving and wonderful from the most unlikely of sources.’
25,000 creators in our Fiction community; 25 of those stories were winners of the Vocal+ Fiction Awards – we had nearly 13,000 entries when we launched this writing challenge back in 2021. Now those stories are published in a gorgeous book that we’ve produced in collaboration with our great friends at Unbound, the crowdfunded publisher. Each of the winners of this challenge won $5,000, and we still run valuable challenges on the site every month. But I know that for those writers published in The Vocal+ Fiction Awards Anthology, the money wasn’t the whole point, not by any means. Winning and publication is a validation of the effort of writing: but writers know too that winning isn’t the only thing, that it’s only part of the process that means trying to get it right – whatever right means to you – each time you take off your bracelets and sit down at your desk.
All the writers in The Vocal+ Fiction Awards Anthology have benefited from the sense of community they’ve found on the platform: and I know I have too. When I read the stories in the book – from Conor Marko’s spooky Pareidolia to Elodie Hollant’s searching Libellule and all the rest – I’m struck by the freshness and adventurousness of these voices, their willingness to try something new. Our writers aren’t confined by ideas of genre – you’ll find sci-fi in Daniel D’Agustino’s Searcher and folk horror in Chelsea Catherine’s the Not-Deer – but find the terrain in which their voices want to move and grow. I’ve been inspired by their work, and I hope you will be too.
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