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  Naomi Alderman
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  Naomi Alderman (born 1974) is an English author, novelist and game designer. Her novel, The Power, won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017.[1]

  Contents  [hide] 
  1
  Biography
  2
  Works
  3
  References
  4
  External links

  Biography[edit]
  Born in London, the daughter of Geoffrey Alderman, a specialist in Anglo-Jewish history,[2] Alderman was educated at South Hampstead High School and Lincoln College, Oxford where she read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. She then went on to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia before becoming a novelist. In 2007, The Sunday Times named her their Young Writer of the Year.
  Alderman was the lead writer for Perplex City, an alternate reality game, at Mind Candy from 2004 through June 2007.[3] She went on to become lead writer on the running video game Zombies, Run! which launched in 2012.[4] She writes a monthly technology column for The Guardian.
  In 2012, Alderman was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, England. In 2013, she was included in the Granta list of 20 best young writers.[5]
  Works[edit]
  Alderman's literary début came in 2006 with Disobedience, a well-received (if controversial) novel about a New York rabbi's lesbian daughter living in North London, which won her the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers,[6] the 2007 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and a feature as one of the Waterstones 25 Writers for the Future.[7] It led her to reject her life as a practising Jew. "I went into the novel religious and by the end I wasn’t. I wrote myself out of it", she told Claire Armistead of The Guardian in 2016.[8] Her second novel, The Lessons, was published in 2010.
  Her novel The Liars' Gospel (Viking), with Jesus turned in to the Jewish preacher Yehoshuah, was published in paperback in 2012.[8] Reviewing the book, Shoshi Ish-Horowicz in the Jewish Renaissance magazine described it as "an entertaining, engaging read" but found the story it told "uncomfortable and problematic. Your enjoyment of the novel will depend on how you respond to the premise that Jesus was, potentially, an 'inconsequential preacher'".[9] Set in and around Jerusalem between Pompey's Siege of Jerusalem (63 BC) and Titus' Siege of Jerusalem (70), it is narrated in four main sections from the perspective of four key figures: Mary, Judas Iscariot, Caiaphas and Barabbas.[10] All three novels have been serialised on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime.[11]
  She wrote the narrative for The Winter House, an online interactive linear short story visualized by Jey Biddulph. The project was commissioned by Booktrust as part of the Story campaign, supported by Arts Council England.[12] Her Doctor Who novel Borrowed Time was published in June 2011.[13]
  In 2012, Alderman was selected as a protégé by Margaret Atwood as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, an international philanthropic programme that pairs masters in their disciplines with emerging talents for a year of one-to-one creative exchange.[14] One result of this was her fourth novel, The Power (2016), a dystopian work influenced by and dedicated to Atwood.[15] The Power won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017.[1]

• London Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/28/naomi-alderman-interview-the-power

  Naomi Alderman: ‘I went into the novel religious and by the end I wasn’t. I wrote myself out of it’

  The novelist and games writer on zombies, her new ‘Atwoodian’ novel and why she can’t stop studying

  ‘Mornings are for books, afternoons are for games’ …Naomi Alderman. Photograph: Felix Clay

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  Interview by Claire Armitstead

  @carmitstead
  Friday 28 October 2016 10.00 BST
  Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 10.47 BST
  Naomi Alderman was 200,000 words into her latest novel when she realised she was going to have to junk it. She’d started it in 2013, put it aside, then picked it up again the following autumn. “It was a dark time. I thought ‘I don’t know how to progress this’,” she recalls. “Then on 20 December, when the year was the darkest it could be, I decided I had to throw it all out.” She ran the decision past two writer friends who had read it. “They both said that it was very brave, but they didn’t say not to do it.”
  Fewer than 2,000 words of that original draft have made it into Alderman’s fourth novel, The Power, but the earlier work is acknowledged with a private joke. The first version had a single protagonist called Christine. In the second, she’s been renamed Roxy, and demoted to one of four central characters. “Christine is her mum and she dies at the start of the book, which is probably how I thought of that first draft.”
  The morphing of Christine into Roxy, and of that first moribund version into the toned and muscled machine that is The Power is the stuff of superhero fiction – appropriately enough for a writer who spends half her day writing novels and the other half working on video games and TV pitches.
  The Power by Naomi Alderman review – if girls ruled the world
  Women have the power and it’s their turn to abuse it, in this instant classic of speculative fiction
  Read more

  In her north London home, where books jostle for wall space with DVDs and games, the 42-year-old writer crackles with the same energy and humour that fizzes from her novel. She’s aware that many early readers regard The Power as her breakout work but is anxious not to jinx it, though it has already sent the television world into a bidding frenzy. She can’t reveal which of 11 offers she accepted, but confirms that the rights have been sold. “Ideally we’re looking at a 10 episode season for five or six seasons, because there’s a lot of world in there.”
  The novel tells the story of what happens after a genetic mutation gives young women the power to electrocute people. What starts out as a fantasy of female empowerment deepens and darkens into an interrogation of power itself, its uses and abuses and what it does to the people who have it. The story is framed by a correspondence between two writers, one of them named Naomi.
  Roxy, the daughter of a London gangster, is joined at its centre by an abuse survivor turned religious leader, a middle-aged female politician and a Nigerian photojournalist – the one male of the quartet – who has made it his mission to report on the geopolitical upheavals caused by this galvanising new female superpower.
  The evolution of the journalist, Tunde, reveals a lot about Alderman’s creative process. He first emerged in a random scene about a man trying to get his passport back, and initially she had no idea where he was headed. It wasn’t until she took The Power back to the drawing board that she realised he belonged at the heart of the novel, adding a valuable male perspective to a narrative that had previously been exclusively female.

  If I’m working every day it’s like pumping a pump. When you start, rusty water comes out and then it runs clear

  She explains: “My aim is that mornings are for books and afternoons are for games. I write 100 words before getting out of bed and 800 words a day, which takes me to about lunchtime, unless it’s a really bad day.” The first hundred words can be about anything, and this was how Tunde arrived. “If I’m working every day it’s like pumping a pump. When you start, rusty water comes out and then it runs clear. I do it even if I get completely stuck.”
  The only time she departs from this routine is during the two months of each year when she is working on a new season of the augmented reality game, Zombies, Run! on which she is co-creator and lead writer, with games developer Six to Start.

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  Launched in 2012, Zombies, Run! is a fitness game that was created to “make exercise less bloody boring”. Each episode sends runners on a “unique mission in the zombie apocalypse”, which is dramatised in audio, with interludes for runners’ own music playlists. “There are currently more than 250 missions out there: each year we release a new season with 40 missions on it. Each mission takes 12 to 14 minutes. That’s the same as a season of Game of Thrones,” she says.
  Before the the full magnitude of this commitment has had time to sink in, she’s rattling on with all the other pursuits she packs into her days - such as nose-to-tail Open University courses. “I’ve done world archaeology and material culture. I’ve just finished one on human biology and started another on the art of the 20th century. It’s 45 minutes of studying and gives a very nice shape to my day.”

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  All this is par for the course for a woman who admits that “what some people describe as being a terrible swot really means I like working hard and learning things. I like putting something really brand new into my brain.”
  Alderman’s passion for learning goes back to her earliest days as the daughter of an academic historian and an artist. Her parents are “unorthodox orthodox jews” who brought her up to be intellectually curious but culturally conservative. When she was seven, her father, Geoffrey, brought home a Spectrum 48K computer which came with a booklet explaining basic programming. “I’d always really enjoyed playing text adventures so I did a bit of programming my own dungeons.”
  She went from a state Jewish primary school in Colindale, “the poor man’s Hendon” in north London, to the highly competitive private secondary, South Hampstead High School. Her parents were both from solidly working class backgrounds. “We weren’t particularly wealthy so I was quite out of place,” she says. “What these schools do, if you come from a background like that, is essentially a process of deracination. For years I looked down on my mother for shopping at Asda, and now I feel very ashamed of it.”
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  Her home life in her teens was overshadowed by “a lot of shocks and alarms”, not least the suicide of her uncle when she was 14 years old, which traumatised her parents and “broke” her grandmother. “It meant that I didn’t have a significant period of adolescent rebellion. To rebel you need to feel safe that your parents will still love you and that they’ll be OK, and after my uncle’s death it was very clear to me that my family were not OK, so I was a very good girl. I remember sitting in the locker room at school to have a cry because I couldn’t do it at home.”
  School, however, was “a very nurturing place”: she found a group of friends, wrote “two and a half chapters of a novel about a girl who could control probability”, and flourished academically. It wasn’t until she landed a place to read PPE at Oxford that she found out how hard it could be to live by different rules.
  On arrival, she was excited to discover a room full of state-of-the-art computers. “I recognised it as my place: I thought I could go there and play these games I hadn’t played before, but I found it full of blokes swapping pictures of topless women, and I was this good orthodox girl.”
  The college kitchens wouldn’t cook kosher food, so she ate at the Jewish Society six days a week and submitted to a double foil-wrapped baked potato on the seventh day so that she could have some vestige of college life. On the eve of each sabbath, she would leave her files in the library and her toothbrush in the bathroom, to avoid having to carry them around – from time to time she would find the toothbrush missing, her papers torn.
  Many years later, at a college reunion, “this bloke sitting next to me turned to me and said, ‘Me and my friends used to mess with your Jewish stuff on the sabbath’, and I thought, what you are confessing to is antisemitic bullying. It’s really shocking to me that he didn’t start by apologising.”
  She had enough confidence to write a novel in her first year (“It was not very good but I finished it”) but she found Oxford “an abusive place”, both socially and academically. “I think on some level I emotionally collapsed – not in a dramatic way, just a long, slow leeching out of my confidence in my abilities.” Surprisingly, she would go on to idealise it in her second novel, The Lessons, the story of a lonely physics student who becomes entranced by richer, more sophisticated friends. “A good read if not unique,” concluded one reviewer, perhaps intuiting that this was not the story she really needed to tell.
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  After university she briefly worked as a PA at a children’s publisher, then talked her way into a job editing publications for an international law firm, which sent her to its New York office. There she became involved in fan fiction, after receiving “a call from God” to attend a Buffy the Vampire Slayer conference in Nashville, Tennessee, “which changed my life by making me think of this show I loved in new, critical, ways”.
  New York also introduced her to orthodox gay and lesbian people “who had these terrible stories: rabbis who said if you didn’t marry and have children you were completing Hitler’s work”. She returned for an MA at the University of East Anglia with the seeds both of serious religious doubt and of her first novel.
  Disobedience was published in 2006, when Alderman was in her early 30s. It placed a New York Jewish lesbian at the heart of a novel set in the north London home of an orthodox rabbi, offering a rare glimpse into a hidden world. It won an Orange award for new writing and its longevity was recently confirmed when the film rights were bought by Rachel Weisz.

  Richard Dawkins calls God ‘an imaginary friend’, and it’s supposed to be insulting, but I hear voices all day long

  The book caused some distress in orthodox circles. When one Jewish paper refused to review it, Alderman’s father – a leading authority on English Jewry – leapt to its defence in the Jewish Chronicle, though even he conceded that it was “perhaps just a little too authentic”. More importantly, it marked the end of her own life as a practising Jew. “I went into the novel religious and by the end I wasn’t. I wrote myself out of it.”
  Looking back on why that decision was so long in coming, she says, “I think some people’s brains have more of a natural bent towards God than others. Richard Dawkins calls God ‘an imaginary friend’, and it’s supposed to be insulting, but I hear the voices of imaginary people talking in my head all day long. I don’t have a problem with it. Also I valued being able to look at the world slantwise. I have a suspicion of lockstep and everyone looking in the same direction: that’s a key character trait in me.”
  Though no longer a believer, Alderman has continued to be fascinated by religion. Her third novel, The Liars’ Gospel, published in 2012, told an alternative life of Christ in which Jesus has become the Jewish preacher Yehoshuah, son of Miryam, who may or may not be a worker of miracles. It, too, caused offence in some quarters. “I love a bit of blasphemy,” she jokes, though there was nothing superficial about her engagement with the Bible. “Hanging over the bare bones of Alderman’s revisionist narrative, like the perfume of roasting meat over a sacrifice, is the poetry of Christian doctrine and myth,” wrote Guardian reviewer Tom Holland. “Before writing it I felt oppressed by Christianity because it’s responsible for so much persecution of Jews; since I wrote it I think of Jesus as my friend. I haven’t allowed him into my heart, just into my sitting room,” she says. She has two more scripture-wrangling stories in mind, one about St Paul and one about Constantine.
  In The Power, a convent gives sanctuary to the newly empowered young women when the male establishment is hunting them down, and – despite the doctrinal problems that they pose – goes on to preserve their stories and to sanctify their conclusion that God must be female.
  It is no coincidence that the novel seems Atwoodesque in its evocation of a closed order of women. It developed after Alderman was “adopted” by Margaret Atwood in a mentoring scheme for young writers, and is dedicated to the novelist and her husband Graeme Gibson, “who have shown me wonders”.
  The Liars' Gospel by Naomi Alderman – review
  Tom Holland on an alternative portrayal of the life of Christ
  Read more

  “The one thing Margaret directly suggested was the idea of a convent,” she says. It was a eureka moment which sparked one of the lateral synapse bursts that characterise Alderman’s way of being. “I’m really interested in who gets to tell the story, and of course the last time we rescued ourselves from dark ages, monks were very important. Think how much of what we do is just copying out the story again with different characters and a different place, and how much we are shaped by that. And God knows, Hollywood is full of repeated stories.”
  Besides the games and the original fiction, she has also written a Doctor Who novel, Borrowed Time, which was published between her second and third books, and which she regards as a form of fan fiction. “The Doctor is god, by the way, in the same way that Apollo or Hercules are gods or demigods. He has his own agenda and has been to the end of time and been present at the creation of life on earth.”
  Suddenly the morning is over and her afternoon “date” is on the doorstep, with whom she is developing ideas for TV. Do come to the book launch, she says, as she waves goodbye. “There’ll be hand buzzers and a plasma ball and I’ll be wearing one of those LED strips sewn into my sleeves.” If the mornings are for fiction and the afternoons are for games, in the evenings who knows what might happen.

• British Council Website - https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/naomi-alderman

  Naomi Alderman
  FictionNon-FictionPoetry
  Born:
  London, England

  Biography
  Naomi Alderman was born in London in 1974 and grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community. 
  After attaining a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Lincoln College, Oxford, Alderman spent several years working in New York. She later returned to the UK and attained an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia.
  Alderman's first novel, Disobedience (2006), inspired by her own upbringing, features a 30-something female protagonist whose father's death is the catalyst for her return to the Orthodox Jewish community in which she grew up. It was awarded the Orange Award for New Writers in 2006, and the following year Alderman won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.
  Alderman's second novel, The Lessons (2010), which explores the lives of a group of Oxford students, has been compared to Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. It was followed by The Liars' Gospel (2012), a mature and ambitious work which offers different perspectives on the life of Jesus through four different narrators. All three novels have been adapted for the BBC Radio Four series, 'Book at Bedtime'.
  Alderman's short stories have been published in Prospect magazine and various anthologies, as well as being adapted for BBC Radio Four. In 2009, 'Other People's Gods' was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award.
  Alderman is also a successful video games writer and creator. She has written online games for Penguin and the BBC, and was the lead writer (2004-2007) on the alternative reality game, 'Perplex City', which was nominated for a BAFTA. In 2012 she was one of the co-creators of a hugely popular iPhone fitness game, 'Zombies, Run!' Alderman has also written Borrowed Time (2011), a tie-in novel for the long-running television series, Doctor Who.
  In 2012 and 2013, Naomi was mentored by Margaret Atwood as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. She is Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University, and in April 2013 she was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in their once-a-decade list.
   
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  Critical perspective Bibliography Awards Author statement
  Critical perspective
  Naomi Alderman's award-winning novel, Disobedience (2006), is regarded as the first novel to explore Orthodox Jewish life in England since George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876).
  Disobedience therefore immediately attracted attention, though it was also controversial - partly because of its critique of London's Orthodox Jewish community and partly because it includes a bold and candid portrayal of lesbianism and bisexuality.
  The novel was inspired by Alderman's own experiences of Orthodox Judaism and there are similarities between the protagonist and the author, but it is not autobiographical. Nonetheless it is firmly rooted in Hendon, north London, where the author grew up, offering a detailed portrait not just of the Jewish community but also the physical locality, even down to real street names and shops:
  I marched through Golders Green, passing by the rows of Jewish stores. The little world my people have built here. The kosher butchers' shops frowned at me, asking why I hadn't tried their chopped liver … Moishe's salon raised an eyebrow at my hairstyle and wondered if I wouldn't like something, maybe, a bit more like everyone else?
  (Disobedience, p.121)
  Disobedience's protagonist is 32-year-old Ronit, whose first-person narrative sections regularly interrupt the third-person prose, offering the reader different perspectives. Ronit is the strong-willed, independent daughter of a highly revered rabbi, Rav Krushka, 'from whom the light of Torah seemed to shine so brightly that [his congregation] felt themselves illuminated by his presence' (Disobedience, p.2). Feeling stifled and oppressed by the inflexible patriarchal traditions of her Jewish community, Ronit has escaped to New York, where she is free to live her own life. However, her father's death at the start of the novel brings Ronit back to Hendon for the first time in several years, where she is simultaneously comforted by Jewish mourning rituals ('It's very orderly, very precise', Disobedience, p.32) and repelled by the monotonous conventionality that drove her away:
  It's being back here with all those little couples sitting in their identical houses producing identical children … They just fit together, the whole set - like Orthodox Jew Barbie: comes complete with Orthodox Jew Ken, two small children, the house, the car and a selection of kosher foodstuffs. (Disobedience, p.115)
  Ronit's return also brings her face-to-face with Esti, a childhood friend with whom she had a sexual relationship. Esti's life provides an interesting contrast to that of the protagonist: while Ronit has rejected Jewish life, Esti has conformed to traditional conventions - cultural, religious and sexual - by marrying a rabbi. By focusing on female characters and, more specifically, lesbianism and bisexuality, Alderman explores with a critical eye the strict hierarchical traditions of Orthodox Judaism, in which women are marginalised and gay women have no place at all. As one critic comments: 'Through the complex relationship between these two characters [Ronit and Esti], Alderman examines the rigid expectations for women within the Orthodox community and gives voice to lives that often remain hidden from the mainstream' (Alderman entry, Contemporary Authors, Gale, 2007).
  Alderman's second novel is rich, evocative and dark: The Lessons (2010) depicts the intense and claustrophobic lives of a group of Oxford undergraduates who cluster around Mark Winters, a rich and glamorous gay man whose hedonistic and promiscuous behaviour hides a deeply troubled and damaged personality. At first glance, The Lessons appears vastly different from Disobedience. However, under the surface there are notable similarities: just as Alderman's first novel offers a critical portrait of the closed world of Orthodox Judaism, The Lessons invites the reader to enter the cloistered, traditional world of Oxford University, one of England's oldest and most prestigious institutions. As Alderman herself comments:
  I was a bit p****d off that so many novels about Oxford talk about the beauty and the glamour and the glittering prizes, but not about the vast amount of work and how everyone seems to be having breakdowns all the time.
  (Alderman's official website, http://www.naomialderman.com/the-lessons/,
  Accessed 8/2/13)
  Alderman goes on to say that, along with the exploration of Oxford life - which, like Disobedience, is inspired by her own first-hand experience - The Lessons is also about money and the damaging effects of a wealthy upbringing: '…partly it's about money. What having a huge amount of money does to a person. How it can distort friendships and relationships' (Alderman's official website, http://www.naomialderman.com/the-lessons/, Accessed 8/2/13).
  Various critics have noted the similarities between The Lessons and Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel, Brideshead Revisited. Damian Barr comments: 'Fantastically rich, flamboyantly Catholic and painfully handsome, Winters could easily - like so many freshers - be a studied pastiche of Sebastian.' Nonetheless, despite the obvious similarities between the two novels, there are also notable differences - Alderman's compelling and ultimately tragic novel is very much her own demystification of Oxford life, as well as a fascinating psychological study of the manipulative influence of a charismatic but disturbed man:
  Alderman's book goes far beyond the Brideshead she carefully evokes … Whereas Brideshead is basically the story of Charles and Sebastian, The Lessons deals with the complex web of relationships spun between all the people under Mark's influence. As a child lines up insects for battle, so Mark toys with the emotions and affections of his erstwhile tenants and friends.
  (Damian Barr, Independent on Sunday, 11 April 2010)
  In her third novel Alderman once again draws on her Jewish roots, but this time she has written an ambitious historical work: The Liars' Gospel (2012) is an original take on the story of Jesus, told through the stories of four people who knew him, each speaking a year after his death. Alderman, richly schooled in Jewish learning, reverts to traditional Hebrew names: Jesus is Yehoshuah, and his story is told in turn by his mother Miryam (Mary); Iehuda of Qeriot (Judas Iscariot), a former friend; Caiaphas, High Priest of the great Temple of Jerusalem, and Bar-Avo (Barabbas), a rebel and murderer.
  Alderman has commented that writing The Liars' Gospel was about 'making sense of this story in a Jewish way' (interview with Margaret Howie, October 2012, http://www.bookslut.com/features/2012_10_019446.php, accessed 4 February 2013).
  Tom Holland agrees that the novel seeks to reclaim Jesus as a Jew:
  Over the millennia, the Jewishness of Jesus has been an embarrassment to Jews as well as to Christians … Now, with her ambitious new novel, Naomi Alderman has given us an entire Jewish gospel, the story of a preacher who may be madman, miracle-worker or both …
  (Guardian review, 6 September 2012)
  Alderman sought the assistance of historians to help her understand the society and politics of Jesus' time, and The Liars' Gospel is an authentic, detailed account of Judea under Roman occupation - a society pervaded by violence and religious extremism. Yet the novel also resonates with modern-day society, reminding us how little has changed and how many religious and political conflicts are still taking place - this is particularly poignant coming from an author who witnessed first-hand the collapse of New York's Twin Towers on September 11th 2001, and later wrote The Liars' Gospel just a few miles away from where the 2011 London riots were taking place.
  Nonetheless, despite her unsentimental approach and her willingness to question religious truths, Alderman does not completely deny the possibility of Jesus' divinity, and she certainly acknowledges the importance of what he taught (note that the word 'Liars' in the title is in the plural and therefore does not refer to Jesus himself, but to those who wrote about him). The novel's epilogue comments:
  So much of what he said, he took from the Torah of the Jews … But Yehoshuah was unique, in his time and place, for saying, 'Love your enemy.'
  It is a dreamer's doctrine. Visionary, astonishing … If all involved had listened to those words, matters would have fallen out quite differently. And if those who claimed to follow him later had dedicated themselves to that one thing - 'Love your enemy' - much bloodshed might have been avoided. (p.260)
  Ultimately, The Liars' Gospel depicts a deep and authentic spirituality, beyond religious doctrine and dogma, as Alderman herself comments: 'It's a blow against the kind of blinkered fundamentalism I grew up with, as well as a genuinely spiritual journey in text' (interview with Margaret Howie, reference above).
  Elizabeth O'Reilly, 2013
   
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  Bibliography
  2012
  The Liars' Gospel
  2011
  Borrowed Time
  2010
  The Lessons
  2006
  Disobedience
  Awards
  2013
  Granta 'Best of Young British Novelists'
  2009
  BBC National Short Story Award
  2007
  Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award
  2006
  National Jewish Book Award for Fiction (US)
  2006
  Orange Award for New Writers
  2006
  Sami Rohr Prize (US)
  Author statement
  Why do I write? The sane answer is: because things make me angry. I think that's mostly where I start, because something has annoyed me and I think to myself 'someone should write about this!' and then I realise that, oh right, that should be me. Well, that's one reason, it's a reason that makes sense. The other reason is something more numinous like: because the words seem to lead me in a particular direction. Other people who've written might understand this, I think. Words lead one on step by step to somewhere new and beautiful and ridiculous. I write for both of those reasons, a sensible one and a crazy one.

• Women's Prize for Fiction Website - https://www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/reading-room/pressroom/naomi-alderman-wins-2017-baileys-womens-prize-fiction

  NAOMI ALDERMAN WINS 2017 BAILEYS WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION
   
  19.30, London, 7th June 2017: British author Naomi Alderman has won the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction with her fourth novel The Power (Viking).
  At an awards ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London – hosted by novelist and Prize Co-Founder, Kate Mosse – the 2017 Chair of Judges, Tessa Ross presented the author with the £30,000 prize and the ‘Bessie’, a limited edition bronze figurine. Both are anonymously endowed.
  Tessa Ross, Chair of Judges, said: “The judges and I were thrilled to make this decision. We debated this wonderful shortlist for many hours but kept returning to Naomi Alderman’s brilliantly imagined dystopia – her big ideas and her fantastic imagination.”
  The Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction — one of the biggest international celebrations of women’s creativity — is the UK’s only annual book award for fiction celebrating excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world. 2017 marks the 22nd year of the Prize. Any woman writing in English – whatever her nationality, country of residence, age or subject matter – is eligible.
  The judges for the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction are:
  Tessa Ross (Chair), CEO House Productions
  Sam Baker, Journalist, Author and Co-Founder of The Pool
  Katie Derham, Presenter and Broadcaster
  Aminatta Forna, Novelist, Memoirist and Essayist
  Sara Pascoe, Comic and Author
   
  Alderman’s win comes just over a decade after her debut novel Disobedience, won the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers. Set up in 2005,to mark the 10th anniversary of the Orange Prize*, the emphasis of the Award was on emerging talent and the evidence of future potential.
   
  “Congratulations to Naomi Alderman – her winning novel The Power is a wonderful example of the exceptional writing the Prize champions, ” commented Syl Saller, Chief Marketing Officer, Diageo. “Baileys is enormously proud to partner with the Prize who have created an open platform for the sharpest, smartest, most compelling women’s writing in the English language.”
   
  Previous winners are – Lisa McInerney for The Glorious Heresies (2016), Ali Smith for How to be Both (2015), Eimear McBride for A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2014), A.M. Homes for May We Be Forgiven (2013), Madeline Miller for The Song of Achilles (2012), Téa Obreht for The Tiger’s Wife (2011), Barbara Kingsolver for The Lacuna (2010), Marilynne Robinson for Home (2009), Rose Tremain for The Road Home (2008), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), Zadie Smith for On Beauty (2006), Lionel Shriver for We Need to Talk About Kevin (2005), Andrea Levy for Small Island (2004), Valerie Martin for Property (2003), Ann Patchett for Bel Canto (2002), Kate Grenville for The Idea of Perfection (2001), Linda Grant for When I Lived in Modern Times (2000), Suzanne Berne for A Crime in the Neighbourhood (1999), Carol Shields for Larry’s Party (1998), Anne Michaels for Fugitive Pieces (1997), and Helen Dunmore for A Spell of Winter (1996).
   
  The awards took place in The Clore Ballroom of the Royal Festival Hall, central London. In addition to the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction winner announcement, aspiring novelist Georgina Roberts was named as the winner of the Baileys Women’s Prize/Grazia First Chapter Competition for unpublished writers.
  Further information on the winning book and author follows.
   
   
  -ENDS-
   

• BBC - http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-40187893

  Baileys Prize: Naomi Alderman wins for 'shocking' sci-fi novel The Power
  By Tim Masters
  Arts and entertainment correspondent
  7 June 2017
  From the section
  Entertainment & Arts

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  Getty Images
  Image caption
  The Power is Naomi Alderman's fourth novel
  Naomi Alderman has won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction for her feminist sci-fi novel The Power.
  Her book envisages a world in which women have developed the ability to give electric shocks at will.
  The chair of this year's judges, Tessa Ross, praised Alderman's "brilliantly imagined dystopia, her big ideas and her fantastic imagination".
  Alderman received the £30,000 prize at a ceremony at London's Royal Festival Hall on Wednesday.
  "The women's movement is more vital to me than any other utility that might come into my house," Alderman said as she accepted her prize to loud cheers and applause.
  "The support and power of other women has been more vital to me than electricity," she went on.
  The literary prize's co-founder Kate Mosse also paid tribute to its first ever winner Helen Dunmore, who died earlier this week, describing her as "an exquisite poet, and extraordinary writer for children and young adults".
  'Full electro-death'
  The Power, Alderman's fourth novel, was published in October last year and explores themes of power, violence and gender.
  It follows four main characters as they adjust to a future in which women can inflict shocks "from a tiny tingle all the way to full electro-death".
  On her website, Alderman describes The Power as "a novel of ideas".
  "What would happen if women had the power to cause pain and destruction? Do we really believe that women are naturally peaceful and nurturing? How much of gender is in our expectations of violence?" she asks.
  Alderman's win comes just over a decade after her debut novel, Disobedience, won the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers. That novel is being made into a film starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams.
  The Power, meanwhile, is being adapted for a TV series by Sister Pictures, co-producer of hit ITV crime drama Broadchurch.
  Alderman, who will write the screenplay, has said the series would "expand" on the stories told in her novel.

  What is the Women's Prize for Fiction?

  Image copyright
  Baileys Prize
  Image caption
  This year's Baileys Prize judges (l-r): Sam Baker, co-founder of The Pool, novelist Aminatta Forna; Tessa Ross, CEO House Productions; broadcaster Katie Derham and comic Sara Pascoe
  The Women's Prize for Fiction is awarded annually to what judges consider the best novel of the year written in English by a female author
  It was co-founded by author Kate Mosse, who believed female authors were often overlooked for major literary prizes
  Previous winners of the prize include Zadie Smith, Ali Smith, Lionel Shriver and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  The first winner in 1996 was the late novelist and poet Helen Dunmore
  Orange sponsored the award for 17 years before Baileys took over in 2014
  The winning author receives £30,000 in prize money and a Bessie - a limited edition bronze figurine

  Alderman, who grew up in London, is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University.
  Her other novels include The Lessons (2010) and The Liars' Gospel (2012). She is one of the presenters of Science Stories on BBC Radio 4.
  She also co-created the best-selling smartphone fitness game Zombies, Run! and wrote the Doctor Who spin-off book Borrowed Time (2011).

  Image copyright
  Naomi Alderman/Viking
  She has been mentored by author Margaret Atwood, whose novel Hag-Seed appeared on this year's Baileys long-list.
  Atwood's quote on the front cover of The Power reads: "Electrifying! Shocking! Will knock your socks off! Then you'll think twice about everything."
  The Power beat five other novels on the shortlist, which included one previous winner, Linda Grant, and one first-time novelist, Ayobami Adebayo.
  The shortlist in full:
  Stay With Me - Ayobami Adebayo
  The Power - Naomi Alderman
  The Dark Circle - Linda Grant
  The Sport of Kings - CE Morgan
  First Love - Gwendoline Riley
  Do Not Say We Have Nothing - Madeleine Thien
  This is the final year that the prize will bear the Baileys name. In 2018, the title will revert to the Women's Prize for Fiction and be supported by "a family of sponsors".
  Lisa McInerney won the prize last year with her debut novel, The Glorious Heresies.

• NewStatesman - https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/qa/2017/04/ns-qa-naomi-alderman-oprah-ovid-and-buffy-vampire-slayer

  26 April 2017
  The NS Q&A: Naomi Alderman on Oprah, Ovid, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer
  “The worst things that ever happened to me were before I was 20.”
  Sign up for our weekly email *

  By
  New Statesman
   
   
   
   

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  What’s your earliest memory?
  Sitting on a striped blue-and-white deckchair with a migraine. My mother gave me orange squash. We’ve worked out (from the deckchair) that I was 18 months old.
  Who was your childhood hero?
  I was incredibly inspired by Oprah Winfrey as a young woman. Her childhood (sexual and physical abuse, teenage pregnancy, the death of her baby) was traumatic, and her subsequent life has been defined by hard work, talent and one glorious victory after another. People in the UK can sneer about her because we are terrified of emotions and she’s not perfect (who is?), but she introduced me to the possibility of improving one’s internal life. A miracle.

  What was the last book that made you envy the writer?
  Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill. It’s as if he managed to voyage back a few hundred years and just take notes.
  What political figure, past or present, do you look up to?
  Florence Nightingale, who was a terrible nurse but a brilliant statistician and wielded her public image to influence politicians to improve health care. I wish that she were still around, skewering ministers misusing statistics on Question Time.
  When were you happiest?
  Now. The worst things that ever happened to me were before I was 20. It has been slow, hard-won improvement since then.

  What would be your Mastermind special subject?
  Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Ovid. Both are intensely serious, as well as funny. Both wield myths to talk about their modern world. Both are subjects I’d like to revise.
  Which time and place, other than your own, would you like to live in?
  The future. As far as possible. Not to live, though – just to visit.
  Who would paint your portrait?
  I’d like [the 16th-century Dutch painter] Jan van Scorel, please, with the same affection and knowingness as his portrait of Agatha van Schoonhoven. They lived together and had six children, even though he was a canon and couldn’t marry.
  What’s your theme tune?
  A Jewish song that goes: “Lo alecha hamlacha ligmor . . .” It translates as: “It’s not up to you to finish the work, but neither are you free to refrain from it.”

  What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received? And have you followed it?
  I know how this sounds, but my deceased grandmother appeared to me in a dream once and told me something I can’t share. But I did follow her advice and it was excellent. (Thanks, Booba and/or my subconscious.)
  What’s currently bugging you?
  Brexit. I want to start a campaign called “Back in 30” – to get us back into the EU by 2030, when Remainers (or Rejoiners) will almost certainly be a convincing majority.
  What single thing would make your life better?
  I wish that Gordon Brown had called a snap election in 2007.
  If you weren’t a writer, what would you be?
  I think I would have enjoyed running a business (and I sort of do run one now, with the video games). I’ve got the brain for systems and a head for figures. But all these daydreams end with: “And I could carve out time to write.”
  Are we all doomed?
  No. The species will continue, whatever apocalypse we manage to unleash. It just won’t be much fun to live through.

  Naomi Alderman’s novel “The Power” (Penguin) has won the 2017 Baileys Prize

• Naomi Alderman Website - http://www.naomialderman.com/

  Are you wondering if that Naomi Alderman who co-created and writes Zombies, Run! could possibly be the same person who writes those literary novels? Having accepted the possibility in your heart, are you puzzling over whether she could be the same person who presents programmes about science on Radio 4? The answer is yes, my friends. I have one of those portfolio careers, which is another way of saying that I'm going to go on doing all the things that interest me until someone tells me I can't anymore. 
  Here's my biography:
   
  Naomi Alderman grew up in London and attended Oxford University and UEA. In 2006 she won the Orange Award for New Writers. In 2007, she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and one of Waterstones' 25 Writers for the Future. 
  Her first novel, Disobedience, was published in ten languages. Penguin published her second novel, The Lessons, in 2010 and her third novel, The Liars' Gospel, in August 2012. Her new novel, The Power, will be published at the end of October 2016. All of her novels have been chosen for BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime slot. 
  Her prize-winning short fiction has appeared in Prospect, on BBC Radio 4 and in a number of anthologies. In 2009 she was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award.
  From 2004 to 2007 Naomi was lead writer on the alternate reality game Perplex City. She's written online games for Penguin, the BBC, and other clients. In 2011 she wrote the Doctor Who tie-in novel Borrowed Time. In 2012, she co-created the top-selling smartphone fitness game and audio adventure Zombies, Run!, which is a market leader and has been downloaded millions of times. 
  Naomi broadcasts regularly, has guest-presented Front Row on BBC Radio 4 and writes frequently for the Guardian. She is one of the presenters of Science Stories, a programme about the history of science on BBC Radio 4, as well as presenting many one-off documentaries. 
  Naomi is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, has been mentored by Margaret Atwood as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, and in April 2013 she was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in their once-a-decade list. 

  And if you're interested in finding out more about me, or asking me a question, the best thing is to @ me on Twitter - I'm @naomiallthenews for public and @naomialderman private. For other enquiries, you can contact my agent, Veronique Baxter at David Higham:
  veroniquebaxter@davidhigham.co.uk

  David Higham Associates
  5-8 Lower John Street
  Golden Square
  London W1F 9HA

The Power

Lauren Bufferd
(Oct. 2017): p22.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
If the best speculative fiction offers up new ways to see our culture, then Naomi Alderman's The Power (winner of the U.K.'s Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction) is destined to be a classic. Imagine a world where women are physically more powerful than men. Then just when you are comfortable with that--or maybe think, hey, it's about time--imagine everything that could go wrong.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The Power tells the disconcerting story of what occurs after a genetic mutation gives teenage girls the power of electricity. At first, they just shock each other for fun, but they quickly learn to harness it, first to protect themselves, then to maim or even kill. The power is transmitted to older women, and eventually, all baby girls are born with a so-called skein of electricity that runs beneath their collarbones like an extra muscle.

Alderman explores the power's trajectory through the lives of three women: Roxy, the daughter of a British mobster; Margot, an American mayor with political aspirations; and finally Mother Eve. Raised in a series of foster homes, Eve, born Alison, uses the power to free herself from an abusive stepfather and reinvents herself as the charismatic matriarch of a female-centric religion. A young Nigerian photojournalist, Tunde, follows the power from country to country, risking his life and offering the important perspective of an outsider.
Speculative fiction has long been a genre where gender roles can be explored--think of The Handmaid's Tale or even back to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland. But Alderman goes beyond her predecessors with a narrative that wonders how long before absolute power corrupts absolutely. Alderman is both a novelist and a co-creator of a smartphone audio adventure app called Zombies, Run!, and it may be this expertise in the world of gaming that brings such a fearlessly creative approach to her storytelling. Both a page-turning thriller and timely exploration of gender roles, censorship and repressive political regimes, The Power is a must-read for today's times.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Bufferd, Lauren. "The Power." BookPage, Oct. 2017, p. 22. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA507825812&it=r&asid=fee59a7bb045b2fc0ae7b31f13c5d7aa. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A507825812

The Power

Kristine Huntley
114.1 (Sept. 1, 2017): p48.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* The Power. By Naomi Alderman. Oct. 2017.400p. Little, Brown, $26 (9780316547611).
Alderman's (The Liar's Gospel, 2013) sublime new novel posits a game-changing question: What if women suddenly manifested an electrical charge that they could control and use as a weapon? This new female "power," the origins of which are attributed to a WWII chemical experiment, first becomes evident in teenage girls around the world in the present time. Roxy, the daughter of an English mobster, attacks the men who have come to kill her mother, while in America, foster-child Allie finds she has the ability to fight off her lecherous foster father. Teenage girls can somehow awaken the power in older women, as Margot, an American politician, learns when her daughter injures a boy in a fight. And in Nigeria, Tunde's journalism career is launched when he observes a girl using her power on another boy. Alderman wrestles with some heady questions: What happens when the balance of power shifts? Would women be kinder, gentler rulers, or would they be just as ruthless as their male counterparts? That Alderman is able to explore these provocative themes in a novel that is both wildly entertaining and utterly absorbing makes for an instant classic, bound to elicit discussion and admiration in equal measure. --Kristine Huntley

YA: The teenage protagonists and the irresistible premise will make this a must-read for YA speculative fiction fans. KH.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Huntley, Kristine. "The Power." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 48. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA509161571&it=r&asid=4c9ce4635f26802568035ebcc7ebbee5. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A509161571

The Power

264.35 (Aug. 28, 2017): p99.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Power
Naomi Alderman. Little, Brown, $26 (400p) ISBN 978-0-316-54761-1
Alderman's science fiction novel, set all over the world, was awarded the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Sometime in the near future, young women discover they have within them the ability to unleash skeins of electrical current that can maim and kill. One of them, an abused American foster child, joins a group of nuns, reinventing herself as the healer Mother Eve. She promotes a new religion in which Jews look to Miriam, Muslims to Fatimah, Christians to Mary. Her ally is an English crime lord's daughter named Roxy, whose skein is warrior strong, and whose violent family has global connections. Meanwhile Tunde, an opportunistic photojournalist, manages to break the news of several women's revolts across the world. The first upheavals are in Saudi Arabia and Moldova, places where women have few rights. But the woman who rules Bessapara, the first nation of the new world order, is unscrupulous and afraid, and she creates further instability by stripping men in her country of all rights and implicitly threatening world war.
Roxy runs into trouble trying to keep a lid on this international situation, while Mother Eve convinces herself it might be for the best to start the world anew. Margot, an American politician taught to tap into her skein by her daughter, rises to power in the States, her message becoming more hawkish as she gains influence. But she is corrupted by her addiction to power over her male rivals, and she, too, plays a part in the endgame. Alderman tests her female characters by giving them power, and they all abuse it. Readers should not expect easy answers in this dystopian novel, but Alderman succeeds in crafting a stirring and mind-bending vision. (Oct.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Power." Publishers Weekly, 28 Aug. 2017, p. 99. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA502652581&it=r&asid=ed3663949c3558eebbea902cb62db454. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A502652581

Alderman, Naomi: THE POWER

(Aug. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Alderman, Naomi THE POWER Little, Brown (Adult Fiction) $26.00 10, 10 ISBN: 978-0-316-54761-1
All over the world, teenage girls develop the ability to send an electric charge from the tips of their fingers.It might be a little jolt, as thrilling as it is frightening. It might be powerful enough to leave lightning-bolt traceries on the skin of people the girls touch. It might be deadly. And, soon, the girls learn that they can awaken this new--or dormant?--ability in older women, too. Needless to say, there are those who are alarmed by this development. There are efforts to segregate and protect boys, laws to ensure that women who possess this ability are banned from positions of authority. Girls are accused of witchcraft. Women are murdered. But, ultimately, there's no stopping these women and girls once they have the power to kill with a touch. Framed as a historical novel written in the far future--long after rule by women has been established as normal and, indeed, natural--this is an inventive, thought-provoking work of science fiction that has already been shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in Britain. Alderman (The Liars' Gospel, 2013, etc.) chronicles the early days of matriarchy's rise through the experiences of four characters. Tunde is a young man studying to be a journalist who happens to capture one of the first recordings of a girl using the power; the video goes viral, and he devotes himself to capturing history in the making. After Margot's daughter teaches her to use the power, Margot has to hide it if she wants to protect her political career. Allie takes refuge in a convent after running away from her latest foster home, and it's here that she begins to understand how newly powerful young women might use--and transform--religious traditions. Roxy is the illegitimate daughter of a gangster; like Allie, she revels in strength after a lifetime of knowing the cost of weakness. Both the main story and the frame narrative ask interesting questions about gender, but this isn't a dry philosophical exercise. It's fast-paced, thrilling, and even funny. Very smart and very entertaining.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"Alderman, Naomi: THE POWER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA499572797&it=r&asid=89dcb523070728bfb7b16d4ec759148d. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A499572797

A world of one's own: Sarah Ditum

Sarah Diturn
145.5341 (Nov. 18, 2016): p51.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
The Power
Naomi Alderman
Viking, 341pp, 12.99 [pounds sterling]
Feminism has done a thorough job of establishing the existence of sex-based inequality, but less so of explaining where this gross unfairness came from. Instead, feminist engagement with evolutionary theories has been mostly of the debunking kind: Simon Baron-Cohen tells us that women are adapted to nurture while men are adapted for conquest; Cordelia Fine patiently explains why this isn't true; and everyone resumes his or her place to repeat the same debate in another five years' time.
Naomi Alderman takes a look at this depressing situation, grasps the whole lot in her fist and crushes it down to a new beginning. The Power starts with a simple question: what if women got the edge? What if, somehow, nature placed a thumb on the scale so that women's tendency to be smaller and weaker than men no longer mattered? This edge, whatever it is, would have to be more significant than physical parity, because it would have to overcome more than bodily difference: something sufficient to upturn millennia of male dominance and all the traditions that sustain it.
At the start of The Power, that something has already happened. The narrative is framed by an exchange of letters thousands of years in the future between a character called Naomi Alderman and her anagrammatic counterpart Neil Adam Armon, who pleads for patronage from an address at the "Men Writers Association". Even that casual use of "Men" as an adjective is shocking, so unfamiliar that it feels like a breach of grammar. It isn't, however: it's just an explosion of the male default. The Power places us in a world where woman is the "one" and man is the "other".
Neil is trying to cajole Naomi into supporting his manuscript, which tells the story of how that world was made. "I think I'd rather enjoy this 'world run by men' you've been talking about," she tells him. " Surely a kinder, more caring and--dare I say it?--more sexy world than the one we live in." She does dare to say it; or rather, there is no daring at all in a woman venturing her opinion and talking smuttily to a man if women have become the superior sex class. Because Naomi has something that Neil doesn't: she has the Power.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Some time around the early 21st century, according to Neil's research, women developed a new organ: under the skin, in the curve of a collarbone, a muscle that allowed them to deliver vicious electrical shocks and even, in the most skilled cases, to control the bodies and minds of their victims. This organ, called the skein, is a response to male violence--we first see it in action when a teenager fights back against the gangland goons sent to murder her mother--but it can also be a source of sexual pleasure. With it, women can inflict as much violence as men can with their penises, and then some. "The power to hurt is a kind of wealth," realises Margot, an aspiring politician, as her skein starts to flicker. The question is: what would women choose to do with such riches?
If Baron-Cohen were right, the violent potential of the skein would be countered by inherent feminine gentleness. In Alderman's imagination, no such moderating influence exists. All of the signifiers in the sexual caste system are upended: "Boys dressing as girls to seem more powerful. Girls dressing as boys to shake off the meaning of the power, or to leap on the unsuspecting, wolf in sheep's clothing." But what starts as cathartic retaliation--and it really is a pleasure to see women zapping gropers and rapists with a touch of their hands--becomes first gratuitous, and then a holocaust.
The slide from tweaked normality to plausible horror is realised here as perfectly as in the best of John Wyndham or Margaret Atwood. The only thing missing, perhaps, is some acknowledgement of that uniquely female ability that Atwood identified in The Handmaid's Tale as the reason men want to possess women: the ability to make babies.
Alderman cannot tell us how we got to where we are. Yet this thrilling, spark-throwing version of the future detonates almost everything that seems normal about gender in the present.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Diturn, Sarah. "A world of one's own: Sarah Ditum." New Statesman, 18 Nov. 2016, p. 51. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473844624&it=r&asid=150b0dd01415a6a2f2183911b83b35ff. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A473844624

Deadlier than the male

Lucy Elizabeth Ellmann
332.9819 (Nov. 5, 2016): p33.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
The Power
by Naomi Alderman
Penguin/Viking, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 339
Teenage girls all over the world have suddenly developed electro-magnetic powers that can be unleashed on anybody who bugs them. The effect of these electrical jolts ranges from a tingly sensation to scarring, shock, pain, permanent disability, dismemberment and sometimes death. So girls have all the 'power' now. Older women soon start zapping too, and thereby move into high office and make millions. It is the end of patriarchy as we know it: almost overnight, women's tolerance of bullying and sexual harassment sinks to zero, and men start dropping like flies. They now become the world's cowering victims, servants, slaves and playthings. Men have to adapt swiftly to their new lowly status, and to kinky, often catastrophic, types of sex.
In this viciously topsy-turvy form of female supremacy, it's men who aren't allowed to drive cars or own businesses, men who are scared to walk around at night, men who can't vote. They are the sex objects, reduced to abs, pecs and glutes, and called sluts. They probably multi-task too.
Boys dress as girls, to seem more powerful. Obituaries of men focus on the famous women they've influenced. And an American TV anchorwoman is encouraged to wear glasses, to give her gravitas, while her much younger male counterpart, an airhead, is only allowed to report on things like apple-bobbing.
There's a strenuous attempt to see the idea through its various ramifications (though it takes men an awfully long time to think of wearing more rubber). This is no feminist utopia, nor, despite a few amusing switcheroo moments, much of a satire.
Power brings out the worst in Alderman's women. They don't pause for a second to suckle babies or make art or try living in harmony with nature or any of that soppy matriarchal jazz. All they seem interested in is rampaging, murdering, running drug cartels, appointing themselves pope, prez, queen and goddess, and generally being jerks.
This plot-driven horror fantasy only gets more crude, cruel and icky, providing an unending parade of gang-rape, eyeball destruction, fish electrocution, and many other sadistic forms of torture, including a kind of ritual male castration, equivalent to FGM, and the minutely detailed demise of a man torn limb from limb. Male supremacists, with the help of Donald Trump, Mike Pence, John Knox, Fathers4Justice and a jihadist or two, could not have written a more damning denunciation of female ascendancy than this.
Why did Naomi Alderman do it? She's got a fun sideline going in illustrations of archaeological finds, and the online misogynistic backlash is wholly believable. But Twitter trolls are just nerds--they're dull. There's far too much about religion, and the writing can be shaky: 'Her face was dry like there was a stopper inside holding it all in.' Any literary adventurousness cedes to saggy apocalyptic derring-do, with the good guys wandering the woods, using whatever technology they have left in an effort to evade maniacal matriarchs. It's for kids. By the end of it all, you'd really rather men stayed in charge.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Ellmann, Lucy Elizabeth. "Deadlier than the male." Spectator, 5 Nov. 2016, p. 33+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468765761&it=r&asid=b53df53f8543d51e97b0308249e28185. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A468765761

The Power

Naomi Alderman
29.2 (April-June 2017): p13.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Sister Namibia
http://www.sisternamibia.org/
Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction winner of 2017. What if the power were in women's hands? In The Power the world is a recognisable place: there's a rich Nigerian kid who larks around the family pool; a foster girl whose religious parents hide their true nature; a local American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family. But something vital has changed, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power - they can cause agonising pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world changes utterly. This extraordinary novel by Naomi Alderman, a Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year and Granta Best of British writer, is not only a gripping story of how the world would change if power was in the hands of women but also exposes, with breathtaking daring, our contemporary world.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Author: Naomi Alderman
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Alderman, Naomi. "The Power." Sister Namibia, vol. 29, no. 2, 2017, p. 13. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA507825706&it=r&asid=fef679081d70f5d401cda7151ff49314. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A507825706

'The Power' is our era's 'Handmaid's Tale'

Ron Charles
(Oct. 10, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
Byline: Ron Charles
Excitement about Naomi Alderman's dystopian novel "The Power" has been arcing across the Atlantic since it won the Baileys Prize for Women's Fiction earlier this year in England. Now, finally, Americans can feel the jolt of this extraordinary book for themselves. Alderman has written our era's "Handmaid's Tale," and, like Margaret Atwood's classic, "The Power" is one of those essential feminist works that terrifies and illuminates, enrages and encourages.
Alderman's premise is simple; her execution endlessly inventive: Teenage girls everywhere suddenly discover that their bodies can produce a deadly electrical charge.
The science is unsettled, but not entirely fantastical. After all, electric eels can generate a jolt, why not humans? Alderman describes "a strip of striated muscle across the girls' collarbones which they name the organ of electricity, or the skein for its twisted strands." Perhaps environmental pollution has triggered this bioelectrogenetic organ in girls, or maybe it's a physiological ability reasserting itself after millennia of latency. But whatever the cause, the capacity of women to shock and awe quickly disrupts the structure of civilization. Suddenly, young men have to be careful. "Already," Alderman writes, "there are parents telling their boys not to go out alone, not to stray too far."
Alderman's greatest feat is keeping this premise from settling toward anything obvious as she considers how the world would adjust if women held the balance of energy and could discharge it at will. What if every interaction was predicated on female supremacy? What if men had to worry about being outshined, overpowered, raped? For Alderman, this isn't just a matter of putting women in all the traditionally male roles. The reversal she imagines is nothing so neat.
The whole novel is powered by an alternating current of horror and wit. (Alderman's skill is delightfully broad: She's one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists and co-creator of the popular "Zombies, Run!" fitness game.) The narrative moves from an American girl's bedroom to a British gang's hangout, to a European forest and beyond, tracing the way this new power surges through families and governments, singeing male pride, inflaming chauvinism and burning the patriarchy to a crisp.
That globe-spanning ambition could easily have dissipated the novel's focus, but Alderman keeps her story grounded in the lives of four characters who are usually sympathetic, sometimes reprehensible:
AaAaAeAacents The daughter of a London crime boss discovers she has an extraordinari potent charge.
AaAaAeAacents An ambitious U.S. politician struggles to manage her power and w over a skittish electorate.
AaAaAeAacents An abused foster child feels inspired to be the Goddess's voice Earth.
AaAaAeAacents A young Nigerian dedicates his life to reporting on the world's gend revolutions.
Chapter by chapter, Alderman rotates among these characters, following their adventures through societies in radical transformation. In India, Saudi Arabia and Moldova, women riot with lightning shooting out of their hands, and men counterattack with bullets and bombs. In liberal Western countries, the transition is more measured; women are counseled to control their power and channel it in positive ways. Schools teach classes in abstinence: "Just Don't Do It."
This book sparks with such electric satire that you should read it wearing insulated gloves. Sometimes, it's small, like Alderman's portrayal of a newscast hosted by a serious woman and her good-looking male sidekick. But other sections will raise the hair on your arms, like the descriptions of war crimes committed by roving bands of blood-lusting women.
Indeed, this is no "Herland," that classic feminist utopia from 1915 in which Charlotte Perkins Gilman describes a matriarchy of peace and wisdom. And it's certainly no "Sleeping Beauties," the bestseller by Stephen King and Owen King that imagines women transported to a parallel realm of feminine wisdom. No, in the female-ascendent world of "The Power," crime and brutality persist and mutate as half the human race panics that its long realm of domination is over, while the other half wonders how to exercise its newfound force.
The novel's most fascinating elements concern the reconstruction of sexuality and theology. We see glimpses of Internet porn reconceived when pleasure and pain are spliced in new ways. Even in polite society, courtship is rewired: While making out, a nice young woman hopes she doesn't lose control and zap her date to death. That new paradigm reverberates all the way down: "Boys dressing as girls to seem more powerful. Girls dressing as boys to shake off the meaning of the power." And archaeological drawings sprinkled through the text add another dimension of grim comedy. One "depicts the 'curbing' procedure -- also known as male genital mutilation."
The revolution courses through religious organizations, too, tearing down old icons and erecting fresh ones. The Gospels must be reimagined. A Church founded on the Father and the Son must adapt, willingly or unwillingly, to the new supremacy of the Mother. "She has overturned heaven and earth for us," a young prophetess announces. Oh, there'll still be room for men to serve, of course, but only in the subordinate roles appropriate for their lesser agency.
In her acknowledgments, Alderman thanks Margaret Atwood, Karen Joy Fowler and Ursula Le Guin -- possibly the most brilliant triumvirate of grandmothers any novel has ever had. That lineage shows in this endlessly surprising and provocative story that deconstructs not just the obvious expressions of sexism but the internal ribs of power that we have tolerated, honored and romanticized for centuries.
So many books -- even great ones -- quickly go dim that picking one that might stay lit for decades is a fool's errand. But in this case, I'm eager to be that fool.
Ron Charles is the editor of Book World and the host of TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Charles, Ron. "'The Power' is our era's 'Handmaid's Tale'." Washingtonpost.com, 10 Oct. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA508988709&it=r&asid=5111072458dc51390eb25fb0e54dd86b. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A508988709

Bufferd, Lauren. "The Power." BookPage, Oct. 2017, p. 22. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA507825812&asid=fee59a7bb045b2fc0ae7b31f13c5d7aa. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017. Huntley, Kristine. "The Power." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 48. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA509161571&asid=4c9ce4635f26802568035ebcc7ebbee5. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017. "The Power." Publishers Weekly, 28 Aug. 2017, p. 99. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA502652581&asid=ed3663949c3558eebbea902cb62db454. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017. "Alderman, Naomi: THE POWER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA499572797&asid=89dcb523070728bfb7b16d4ec759148d. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017. Diturn, Sarah. "A world of one's own: Sarah Ditum." New Statesman, 18 Nov. 2016, p. 51. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA473844624&asid=150b0dd01415a6a2f2183911b83b35ff. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017. Ellmann, Lucy Elizabeth. "Deadlier than the male." Spectator, 5 Nov. 2016, p. 33+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA468765761&asid=b53df53f8543d51e97b0308249e28185. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017. Alderman, Naomi. "The Power." Sister Namibia, vol. 29, no. 2, 2017, p. 13. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA507825706&asid=fef679081d70f5d401cda7151ff49314. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017. Charles, Ron. "'The Power' is our era's 'Handmaid's Tale'." Washingtonpost.com, 10 Oct. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA508988709&asid=5111072458dc51390eb25fb0e54dd86b. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.

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