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WORK TITLE: Elmet
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BIRTHDATE: 1988
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LAST VOLUME:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/13/man-booker-prize-2017-shortlist-debuts-big-names-saunders-mozley-fridlund-smith-auster * https://www.ft.com/content/0ff7de0a-8cb8-11e7-9580-c651950d3672?mhq5j=e5 * https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/17/fiona-mozley-debut-novel-elmet-booker-longlist
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1988.
EDUCATION:Cambridge University, B.A.; York University, Ph.D. candidate.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Travel agent, English as a second language teacher. Artellus Limited, internship; The Little Apple Bookshop, High Petergate, York.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Elmet, the debut novel that Fiona Mozley wrote on her phone on the train during her commute outside of London was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. She is the second-youngest author to be up for the prize. In the book, she writes about a father and his two children building and living in a house in the Yorkshire countryside. Mozley is a Ph.D. candidate in medieval studies at York University studying the relationship between medieval towns and the landscape. She taught English in Buenos Aires, interned at a literary agency, worked as a travel agent, and worked at The Little Apple Bookshop in York.
Elmet is the name of the Celtic kingdom that once covered Yorkshire. In the coming-of-age story, fourteen-year-old Daniel narrates the life of him, his sister Cathy, and father Daddy who squat on land near the woods. They live off the land by hunting, and Daddy, a brute of a man that reminds Daniel of Robin Hood, fights other men for cash. Following themes of masculinity, gender, and the human body, Mozley explained to an interviewer online at the Guardian: “The father is the archetypal masculine man—he’s enormous and strong but he has these two children who in some respects aren’t like him at all—they don’t conform to expectations of gender. I wanted to explore that tension.”
With bearly any schooling, the teenagers live a feral existence, isolated in the woods, away from the perceived exploitation, corruption, and property rights of the city. Trouble begins when the landlord wants the family off his land. In an interview with Scott Simon on National Public Radio, Mozley explained that she wrote the book because she wanted to talk about the landscape that she grew up in. “It was something that came to me while I was living in London away from home and paying rent and sort of wondering what the relationship between a person and a place was. And I suppose those were the issues that I wanted to explore.”
“Brutal, bleak, ethereal, Mozley’s novel combines parable with urgent contemporary truths about dispossession and exploitation. Reading Elmet leaves the metallic taste of blood in the mouth: centuries old, yet as fresh as today,” according to New Statesman contributor Catherine Taylor. In her review for the Varsity Website, Juliet Martin remarked: “Mozley avoids triteness by spiking this fairytale with an arresting, often twisted realism. This novel possesses atmosphere in abundance. Characters seem to spring directly from their remote surroundings and Mozley combines rural austerity and human violence with a striking, Bronte-esque vitality.” Labeling the novel accomplished with very few missteps, a writer in the Economist asserted: “Elmet is a quiet explosion of a book, exquisite and unforgettable.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Economist, August 2017, review of Elmet, p. 64.
New Statesman, August 18, 2017, Catherine Taylor, review of Elmet, p. 52.
ONLINE
Evening Standard, https://www.standard.co.uk/ (July 28, 2017), Susannah Butter, author interview.
Varsity, https://www.varsity.co.uk/ (October 6 2017), Juliet Martin, review of Elmet.
Weekend Edition Saturday, NPR, http://www.npr.org/ (September 16, 2017), Scott Simon, “Fiona Mozley on Making the Man Booker Shortlist with Her Debut Novel.”
< Fiona Mozley On Making The Man Booker Shortlist With Her Debut Novel September 16, 20178:08 AM ET Listen· 2:30 2:30 Queue Download Embed Facebook Twitter Email SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Fiona Mozley started writing her first novel on her phone while riding the train between her home in York, Northern England, and an internship in London. It's the story of a father and his two children who live out in the margins of society in a house they built with their own hands in the Yorkshire countryside. Her book, "Elmet," was published last year. And this week, "Elmet" is one of six books shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, one of the world's most prestigious literary awards. Fiona Mozley joins us from York. Congratulations, and thanks for being with us. FIONA MOZLEY: Thanks very much, Scott. Lovely to meet you. SIMON: Paul Auster, George Saunders, Mohsen Hamad, Ali Smith - you are with some of the greatest names in literature in this award. How does that feel? MOZLEY: It feels pretty daunting. But those of them that I've met so far have been very lovely indeed, so it hasn't been too bad. SIMON: Where's this story, which, to say the least, has some dark passages - where does that come from? MOZLEY: I really wanted to talk about the landscape that I grew up in and the idea of owning a home. It was something that came to me while I was living in London away from home and paying rent and sort of wondering what the relationship between a person and a place was. And I suppose those were the issues that I wanted to explore. And then the characters came to me as I was riding that train, as you've mentioned. SIMON: I understand you didn't tell your friends and family for some time that you were working on this novel. MOZLEY: I really didn't think I would finish it. And when I started, I didn't mention it to anyone. And it just became a secret project that I pursued in the evenings and weekends. And as I got closer and closer to finishing, I felt that if I did tell someone then, it would make it even less likely to happen. So I kept it quiet. SIMON: You're still working at a bookstore? MOZLEY: That's right, yes. I'm doing a Ph.D. at the University of York, but I work in a bookshop a couple of days a week. And I also think that it's important for writers to do something other than write. I like that working at the shop brings me into contact with people. And yes, I'm surrounded by books, so it's not very different from writing perhaps. But actually, the human contact is necessary, I think. SIMON: Fiona Mozley - her book is "Elmet." And it has been shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize. The winner will be announced on October 17. We'll certainly look for your name. Thank you for speaking with us. MOZLEY: Thank you.
Fiona Mozley: I wrote a novel on my commute — now it might win the Booker Prize
At just 29 years old, Fiona Mozley is up for a prestigious literary prize. She tells Susannah Butter about the new gender roles, hutching up in a shared house and why Theresa May should read her book
Susannah Butter
Friday 28 July 2017 12:26
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Girl on the train: Fiona Mozley’s debut novel Elmet, which is out in November, is on this year’s Man Booker long list SWNS
Fiona Mozley wrote her Man Booker longlisted novel Elmet on her phone while commuting. “To get it finished I just had to take it one sentence at a time, whenever I could,” she recalls.
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Mozley, who at 29 is the second- youngest author to be up for the prize after 2013’s winner Eleanor Catton, then 28, started the novel four years ago, in secret. She had just graduated from Cambridge University with an English degree and was living with five friends crammed into a small house in Honor Oak Park, doing an internship at literary agency Artellus Limited.
“I was finding London life difficult — the strain of the capital was taking hold,” she says. “I was living for the next pay cheque and at a loose end. I didn’t know what career I was going to have or where I was going to live in the next year.” She was paying £600 a month to share a house where “we had secret tenants — when the landlord visited we had to fold away my bed and pretend it wasn’t there”.
Her friends have teased her that the book’s title sounds like the children’s book Elmer the Patchwork Elephant, which she takes with a laugh. In fact, Elmet was the last independent Celtic kingdom in England, between the fifth and seventh centuries, and later became the West Riding of Yorkshire. Mozley is completing what she calls a “niche” PhD at York University about the concept of decay in late-medieval towns and eco politics.
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Her novel addresses property ownership. It’s told from the point of view of Daniel, a boy remembering his life with his sister Cathy in a house their father built with his bare hands. They are not like other children. Their father is loving but prone to fits of rage, and his behaviour creates tension in the community.
“The father is a gruff, self-sufficient bare-knuckle boxer who builds a house on land he doesn’t own,” says Mozley, talking about her characters like they are people she knows. “The land isn’t being used but the owners don’t like what he has done. I feel no one can say anything these days without bringing up politics, but this book does touch on a community left behind.
It’s no coincidence that I started the book when living in London.”
Does the Grenfell Tower fire give these ideas of home- ownership and rights new resonance? “Absolutely.”
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Masculinity, gender and bodies are also themes. “The father is the archetypal masculine man — he’s enormous and strong but he has these two children who in some respects aren’t like him at all — they don’t conform to expectations of gender. I wanted to explore that tension.” If a film was made of Elmet he’d “have to be played by Tom Hardy or Idris Elba”. Mozley says his violence is influenced by her love of Clint Eastwood films rather than any tension in her own family. “My own father [a retired social worker] is a gentle, lovely man. I wanted to write about people so different from me and my family.”
The novel touches on gender queerness, too. “In many ways it feels like we are living in the last gasp of old-fashioned gender roles, but perhaps that’s just people like me saying that and it’s more pervasive than we’d like to think. The situation in America [with Trump banning transgender people from the army this week] is dire.”
The novel’s setting came to Mozley on a train back to London from York on a trip to visit her parents. “I was looking out at the South Yorkshire landscape, the copses and outbuildings. I already had questions I wanted to explore, and those things came together.”
Mozley was born in Hackney but grew up in York and moved back there recently. She lives with her partner, Megan, who the book is dedicated to. She came out as a teenager and it was undramatic. Megan is also studying for a PhD (they work side by side) and they have a lurcher dog called Stringer, named after the character in The Wire.
Writing about nature in a lyrical style was “escapism” for Mozley. There was no grand plan. She wrote “to give me a sense of achievement that I’d finished something”. Her friends were asking her what she wanted to do with the rest of her life and it was hard not to tell them about the book. “They were doing impressive things but I didn’t want to say too much because I didn’t want it to become real before it was the right time.” When her family and friends eventually found out, “they had just seen me on my computer and thought I was browsing Facebook or watching Netflix. Sometimes I was.”
Read more
This is how to write a book without giving up your day job
She announced the book’s publication on Facebook and was touched by the response. This became particularly poignant in the past few months. A friend of her best friend died in the Manchester Arena attack in May, and she went to his vigil. “Martyn [Hett], who died, was a mesmerising and magnetic individual. He had hundreds of friends but when I announced the book was published he took the time to congratulate me, which was much appreciated and testament to the person he was, making time for the little people.”
Mozley works part-time in a bookshop and wouldn’t give that up even if she won the £50,000 Booker money. She is adamant that shops have a future in the internet age. “People come in and say how much they love browsing and holding the real thing.” She’s recommending Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends to customers for summer. A second book by her is on the way, which addresses owning and renting property and land.
She doesn’t think she’ll buy her own house anytime soon. “The possibility of ever buying a house is distant. I don’t know how it could be resolved. In Elmet the repercussions of the right-to-buy scheme are covered. The London housing market is absurd.” She supports Jeremy Corbyn and was “hungover” after election night. Should Theresa May read the book? “Yes. There are characters and issues that probably seem distant to a lot of people and people of May’s generation and inclinations. Books help you imagine the lives of others.”
Elmet is out on August 10, John Murray
The rest of the Man Booker longlist
4321 by Paul Auster
A hero’s life in a four-way narrative.
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry
Love and loss between two soldiers.
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund
A teenage girl’s struggle.
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
A reality-bending narrative on refugees.
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack
A celebration of small-town Ireland.
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor
Abduction in a village.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
Roy’s long-awaited second novel.
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
President Lincoln mourns his son.
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
An immigrant family at war with itself.
Autumn by Ali Smith
A post-Brexit story.
Swing Time by Zadie Smith
Friendship and rivalry, set across continents.
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
A haunting story about escape from slavery.
Fiona Mozley: I’m on the Man Booker shortlist and top of my fantasy football league
The debut novelist, Booker-shortlisted for Elmet, on the joys of daydreaming, stationery and electric guitars
Fiona Mozley … ‘I now have a career that suits my weaknesses as well as my strengths.’ Illustration: Alan Vest
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Fiona Mozley
Saturday 30 September 2017 10.00 BST
Last modified on Tuesday 3 October 2017 11.13 BST
I
have never been one for routine. At my school, I was renowned for having the second to worst punctuality record in its forty-something-year history, eclipsed in that department only by my older sister. It’s true that I wasn’t always thrilled by the prospect of school, but it wasn’t this that kept me away. I would just lose track of time. I would get ready in the morning – have a shower, brush my teeth, get dressed, whatever – then would suddenly stop. I would fall into a daydream, a deep stupor, and would be entirely unable to pull myself out of it. I would race to catch up, but no matter. I received detentions, lines, letters home. I was even once threatened with expulsion, though my smug 16-year-old self knew this to be something of an empty threat – in all other respects I was a good student. But none of it did any good. When I fell into one of these dazes, I was lost to the world.
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I am still like this. My ability to zone out infuriates my family and friends. It not only causes me to be late for things, or forget to complete everyday tasks; they can be speaking directly at me and I won’t hear them. I’m sure there’s something wrong with me. Something pathological.
Only now that I am, I suppose, officially a “writer”, I can get away with this sort of thing more. Daydreaming is now work. It is the time when ideas happen. Indeed, all sorts of aspects of my personality and daily routine seem justified now that they can be allotted a position in the “creative process”. I now have a career that suits my weaknesses as well as my strengths. Ideal.
When I started my first novel, Elmet, I wasn’t a writer. I had a full-time job and a lengthy commute. I would jot down bits and pieces here and there – on my mobile phone – and I would write for more prolonged periods in the evenings and weekends. After I had moved back to York to begin my MA and PhD, writing fiction took a back-seat but I would still return to it now and then, particularly when I had a pressing thesis deadline.
‘I can spend hours watching YouTube videos about the circuitry of different distortion pedals …’ Photograph: Hodder & Stoughton
These days, I start the morning with a cup or five of coffee. It still takes me a while to get going, and my partner, who has generally walked the dog and commenced work on her PhD by the time I have finished my shower, will often come back into the bedroom from our shared study to find me sitting, staring into space, with a sock halfway up my foot. She will gently bring me back to the world and remind me to finish getting dressed, and slowly but surely I will clothe myself and begin to work. Oh, the invisible labour of writers’ wives.
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I sometimes write on my computer and I sometimes write by hand. I have a serious stationery fetish and if I see a nice new notepad or pen I will have to buy it, regardless of whether I have finished the one I am currently using. There was a time when I felt guilty about this, but then I realised that if the very particular pleasure of writing on virgin paper meant that I managed even a few sentences, it was probably worth it, regardless of how wasteful it was.
When I write on my computer, there is, of course, the temptation of the internet. Email, Facebook and Twitter are prime culprits, but I must also admit to some other, more niche, distractions. I am a person who develops obsessions quite easily. Two of my serious interests are electric guitars and vintage cameras. So far, so hipster.
However, when I am really lost in procrastination, it is not just the playing of music or the taking of photographs that catches my attention, but the objects themselves. I can spend hours watching YouTube videos about the circuitry of different distortion pedals or the properties of different photo-negative developing agents. I tell myself this knowledge may one day find its way into a novel, and will therefore be useful, but I’m pretty sure it’s the kind of detail that any good editor would instantly cut.
My present obsession is fantasy football and, lately, writing has been punctuated by checking scores, transfer rumours and injury updates (yes, on the Guardian online). I am in a league comprised of the owners and members of staff of the bookshop I work at, along with their partners and extended families, and I am sitting at the top of that little league. My recent good news regarding the Man Booker prize shortlist has been met with unanimous joy. My success in our league, however, has not been.
Fiona Mozley's Elmet is on the Man Booker shortlist.
In brief
Hours: occasionally • Words: hopefully • Time spent emailing: divided by time spent ignoring emails • Work satisfaction: direct correlation to fantasy football points
'I already feel like I've won': Fiona Mozley, the new face on the Booker longlist
Catapulted from anonymity to literary stardom, the 29-year-old from York talks about her sylvan debut novel, Elmet, and how it was fuelled by her anger at inequality
‘I was probably quite an angry young woman’ … Fiona Mozley. Photograph: Hodder & Stoughton
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Richard Lea
@richardlea
Thursday 17 August 2017 07.59 BST
Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 10.27 BST
Fiona Mozley was sitting in a cafe when she heard the news. She had been out walking her dog by the river, and had stopped for a coffee on the way home, when she got a call from her editor.
“I thought she’d managed to secure a good quote for the front cover,” says Mozley. “It was obviously good news. I could tell from the tone of her voice.” The rest is a bit of a blur, with her dog, Stringer, barking and jumping around as he caught on to her gradually increasing excitement. By the time she put down the phone, Mozley was reeling from the discovery she had been longlisted for the Man Booker prize with a book that wasn’t even due to be published until September.
The novel that has catapulted her into Booker contention began on a train. Born in 1988, Mozley grew up in York, studied history at Cambridge and spent six months teaching English in Buenos Aires before coming back to Britain in 2011. After a year interning at a literary agency, spending most of her salary renting a room in a shared house in south London, she decided she needed to earn a little more money, so got a job as a travel agent.
Fiona Mozley, with her excitable dog Stringer. Photograph: Hodder & Stoughton
Elmet by Fiona Mozley review – the wild card on the Man Booker longlist
This dark debut about a family living on the outskirts of society is an impressive slice of contemporary noir steeped in Yorkshire legend
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But she was still homesick. Heading back south from York on the east coast mainline, she was thinking about a novel examining land, ownership and community, when she hit on the idea of a character – a great, hulking man, a larger-than-life figure from myth or legend. A first line came to her: “Daddy and Cathy and I lived in a small house that Daddy built with materials from the land here about.” By the time she arrived in King’s Cross, she had a first chapter and she was off and running.
Her book, Elmet, charts how John, a man-mountain who used to make his money as a bare-knuckle boxer and muscle for hire, retreats from his hostile world to a copse in Yorkshire’s West Riding. He makes a refuge for his children and teaches them to live off the land, foraging for berries, planting plums and potatoes, hunting pigeons and pheasants with bows and arrows whittled from oak or yew. But Daddy doesn’t own the land on which he has built his home, and, when the man whose name is on the title deeds pays them a visit, a confrontation begins that can only end in disaster.
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This struggle over possession and belonging is recounted in stripped-down, granite prose modelled on Cormac McCarthy: short, declarative sentences and minimal punctuation. This straightforward style comes partly from imagining Elmet as a kind of Yorkshire western and partly from Mozley’s young narrator, Daniel.
“I had these very lofty social, political, environmental and cultural ideas, but Daniel has never read eco-critical theory, or gender theory,” she explains. “He’s not read Judith Butler, he’s not going to draw on that kind of vocabulary.”
Living with Cathy and Daddy in the copse, Daniel lets his hair and nails grow long, he wears his jeans tight and his T-shirts short. His sister likes to explore the woods and fields, but Daniel prefers to curl up with a book or make the house look nice. It’s not that he wouldn’t have called himself a man or a boy, he just “never thought about it”.
As someone who describes herself as queer, as “a woman, but with caveats”, Mozley says she “could never write a novel which didn’t have queer characters at its heart. I wouldn’t know how to write that novel. So it was always going to be there. That aspect was a conscious decision, but it wasn’t really a choice.”
Elmet is deeply rooted in the landscape of Mozley’s childhood, from the hare standing so still in a field it seems she has “grabbed hold of the earth and pinned it down with her at its centre”, to a winter morning with “summer scents … bottled by the cold”.
Rooted … woods in West Yorkshire. Photograph: Rebecca Cole/Alamy Stock Photo
But the novel also bears the marks of the PhD in medieval history she is currently pursuing at York University, with a plot forged by changes in society that have played out in the north of England over hundreds of years.
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“There’s this community that, at one point, all lived on the land and worked the land, and then were dragged from the land and into the mines or the mills because of the Industrial Revolution,” Mozley says. “Then the mines and the mills were no longer profitable, so we spat all these people out. But we don’t give them back the land, so what do they do?”
It’s an issue that is both timeless and timely, an issue the author says fuelled the novel with the anger she feels as part of a generation that finds itself “paying all of our salaries to other people for no clear reason”.
“I was probably quite an angry young woman,” she says – but living with a book as intense, as visceral as Elmet for more than five years can’t help but change you. “I was a much darker person when I started it, and I’m really not any more. I’m quite cheery.”
Mozley’s unexpected appearance on the Booker longlist has only further improved her mood. “It is overwhelming,” she says, “but I’m making a concerted effort to try and enjoy myself and take the positives from it.”
For a debut author whose book wasn’t even published when the list came out, it isn’t a question of winning or losing as “I already feel like I’ve won.” She remarked to a friend that as the shortlist doesn’t come out until September, she would at the very least remain in the competition until the autumn. But her friend pointed out that she’ll always be on the 2017 longlist. “Which I will,” she smiles. “I’ll always be in the 2017 Booker dozen, no matter what else happens. Pretty cool.”
Elmet is published by John Murray Originals at £10.99 and is available for £9.34 from the Guardian Bookshop.
Fiona Mozley On Her Debut Novel Being Shortlisted For The Man Booker Prize
When Fiona Mozley’s Elmet made the Man Booker Prize shortlist this year, she cemented her position as the buzziest debut novelist of 2017. Named after the Celtic kingdom that once covered Yorkshire, the narrative follows 14-year-old Daniel, who lives with his father and sister in a remote copse in the present-day North – but when feudalistic landowners try to reclaim the trio’s area of secluded woodland, the plot turns darker. Vogue sat down with the 29-year-old to discuss everything from her work ethic to her love of Jurassic Park.
By Hayley Maitland
Monday 16 October 2017
How did you start writing the novel?
I began writing Elmet on my phone on an early morning train back to London after visiting my parents in York. I was watching the scenery of what was once Elmet go past - a familiar landscape for me, since I was raised in Yorkshire - and I was wondering about the houses along the railway lines and the people who lived there. That was the genesis of the plot, but I had been considering writing a novel for ages.
Were you always hoping to write professionally?
I never made a conscious decision to have writing be my profession. It was more that I was keen to write a novel, but I had no idea if I would be able to finish it, let alone get it published. Writing novels has never been a particularly stable career. It’s only after everything that’s happened with the Man Booker Prize shortlist that I have reluctantly started describing myself as a novelist.
You were working on your novel for more than three years by yourself; how did you push yourself to finish it?
I actually made a pact with myself at the beginning to just keep going no matter what, even though I had ideas for different novels that I preferred while I was writing Elmet. I was working on my PhD in medieval studies at York University at the time, so I really had to carve out moments to write in between doing everything else. I just told myself that I only had to do a hundred words in a sitting, and if I did that on enough occasions, I would have a novel. There were a lot of days when I thought it was rubbish though – and I was seriously tempted to delete everything more than once.
Tell me about how you felt when you were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
I heard that I was shortlisted just before going to a party at the Serpentine Gallery, which was lovely, but to be honest, getting longlisted was what shocked me the most. I had no idea that it was coming. I was sitting in a café in York when my editor rang me from London and told me the news. It was one of the most bizarre moments of my life. I was so excited that even my dog, Stringer, could tell and started barking like crazy.
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What To Read This Autumn
By Hayley Maitland
Looking back now, what would you tell your 16-year-old self?
So many things, but most of all, just be patient. When I was 16, I was really ambitious – much more so than I am now – and determined to make something of my life right away. In my mind, everything needed to happen immediately. If I had been prepared to wait a little bit, I would have been a lot happier.
Which five novels would you take with you to a desert island?
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, which is a bit grim for a desert island but is still one of my absolute favourite novels. The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K Le Guin, a fantastic sci-fi novella written in the Seventies. The Northern Lights by Philip Pullman, which I loved as a child. For a hefty tome, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. And Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick - another sci-fi novel!
What your guiltiest pleasure?
Lying in. Sleeping is my favourite activity. My partner is an early riser, and I’m fairly certain that that’s the only reason I ever get out of bed.
Who would play you in the film biopic of your life?
Obviously, I would go with someone much fitter than me. Maybe Julianne Moore because she’s got red hair like mine. She’s quite a bit older than me, but that’s fine. Actresses are always made to play women who are much older than them, so maybe she can play someone much younger for a change. Otherwise, Rose Leslie, who is also beautiful.
Which films could you watch over and over again?
The 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. I had it on VHS as a teenager before DVDs even existed – or at least before I was aware of them. Once Upon a Time in the West, because I’m a massive fan of Westerns, and it’s one of the best. And, for a guilty pleasure, Jurassic Park – the original.
And, finally, what album would be the soundtrack to your life and why?
A Different Class by Pulp. I never get bored of it. Plus, it’s by a Yorkshire band…
28th July
Debut writer Fiona Mozley speaks of total surprise of Man Booker longlist
Simon Walton
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A DEBUT novelist from York has spoken of the moment when she heard she has been longlisted for one of the world's most prestigious literary prizes.
Fiona Mozley, 29, had been for a walk with her lurcher Stringer when her editor called to tell her she was on the list for the £50,000 Man Booker Prize with her contemporary novel, Elmet, due to be published in two-weeks time.
"I was so overwhelmed that I gasped and the dog started barking," she said. "It was a huge shock as I didn't know my novel had been submitted for the prize. My best hope has been that it would sell enough copies to cover the printing costs."
Because of the longlist, her publisher John Murray will increase its planned print run of 1,000 to 5,000 for its release on August 10, under its imprint JM Originals.
Miss Mozley is studying for a PhD in medieval studies at York University and works in The Little Apple Bookshop in High Petergate at weekends.
Elmet tells the story of a father and his two children who come into conflict with land owners after they build a home for themselves in a copse in South Yorkshire. It is described as atmospheric and unsettling.
The former Fulford School pupil studied at Cambridge University and was travelling from York to London on the train when she got the idea for the book.
"I wrote the first chapter on the train when my native North Yorkshire whizzed by the window," she said. "I missed the landscape so moved back home to York. It took me three years to finish it, writing intermittently."
Elmet was the name of a Celtic kingdom in Yorkshire. "I wanted to give it a name that signified land," she said."The book is like a Western, in that there is dispute over territory."
This year's Booker longlists includes literary giants, such as Arundhati Roy, Ali Smith, Sebastian Barry, Jon McGregor and Zadie Smith.
There are two other debuts: History Of Wolves by Emily Fridlund, and George Saunders' first full-length novel, Lincoln In The Bardo.
The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel, written in the English language and published in the UK.
Fiona Mozley interview
Submitted by Alice on Sun, 2017-08-27 17:25
The Man Booker Prize 2017 longlist
In this Man Booker Prize 2017 longlisted author interview Fiona Mozley tells us being longlisted for Elmet has been out of the ordinary and how her novel is strongly rooted in the history of the landscape she grew up in.
What has it been like to be longlisted?
My partner has described it as ‘extreme news’. It has been out of the ordinary. Because the novel was not published when the longlist was announced, there had been no build up. I still find it strange to think of people reading the story I wrote, let alone including it in such an illustrious list. It is also obviously very exciting. I was hopeful that some people would enjoy Elmet when it was published, but I could not have anticipated anything like this.
What are you working on next?
Another novel. It contains similar themes to Elmet – property, ownership, gentrification - but the setting and characters are very different. It also has many voices, so there has been a stylistic shift too.
What are you reading at the moment?
Anna Karenina, Silas Marner and History of Wolves. Also, a collection of poetry called And Now They Range by Karl O’Hanlon.
What is your favourite Man Booker-winning novel?
Wolf Hall. This is probably predictable given my interest in late-medieval history.
You were writing a PhD thesis while working on Elmet, did the two disciplines and styles help or hinder one another?
My PhD considers the relationship between medieval towns and the natural environment, so I have spent the past few years thinking about issues relating to community, land, and property in quite some depth. These themes and concerns have certainly seeped into Elmet, and while it is a contemporary novel, it is strongly rooted in the long history of the landscape I grew up in, which is fed by medieval myths and legends. Writing a novel is a very different process, however, and there were moments when I had to bury myself in writing creatively, as well as other times when the PhD became the priority.
The story in the soil
Catherine Taylor
146.5380 (Aug. 18, 2017): p52.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Elmet
Fiona Mozley
JM Originals, 320pp, 10.99 [pounds sterling]
In the autumn of 616 or 617 AD, one of the last remaining Celtic kingdoms of ancient Britain to withstand Anglo-Saxon settlement was conquered by its Northumbrian neighbours. Elmet, which covered what is now the West Riding of Yorkshire, was referred to by Bede as "silva Elmete" ("forest of Elmet"), with its devastation verified by the Historia Brittonum, which claimed that Edwin, the king of Northumbria, "occupied Elmet and expelled Certic, king of that country". In 1979, several years before becoming poet laureate, the Celtic obsessive Ted Hughes collaborated with the photographer Fay Godwin on Remains of Elmet: A Pennine Sequence, a book that evoked the "spectacular desolation" of the Calder Valley where he grew up, a landscape saturated with myth and memory.
There is more than a hint of Hughes's shamanistic unleashing of the power of language in Elmet, Fiona Mozley's debut novel, a work of troubling beauty that has been longlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize. At once spare and ornate, Mozley's writing digs deep into what could be termed the psycho-geology of Yorkshire, much as Alan Garner's work does with Cheshire: the intermittent glimpses of vanished lives from centuries earlier alongside those of the present day, the trauma of past upheaval and resettlement echoing along the dark valleys.
Elmet, for all its formality and ritual style, has a modern setting but appears to inhabit a space that is outside time. Opening with a ragged account from a survivor of a savage act of destruction, the narrative moves back to the events leading up to the routing of a smallholding held by the 14-year-old Daniel and his conspicuously small family: his sister, Cathy, and their father, John, always referred to as "Daddy" or "my Daddy".
Daddy is a giant of a man, worshipped by both children, "more vicious and more kind than any leviathan of the ocean ... His music pitched above the hearing of hounds and below the trembling of trees." Far from being carried away on a crescendo of poetic whimsy, however, the book is firmly rooted in stark realities. Daddy is a violent man, who makes his living from bare-knuckle fighting.
Having removed his children from school, he sets about building a house in a remote copse on land that he does not own. Lawless, but then so is Price, the most powerful and ruthless of the unscrupulous local landlords who dominate this ex-mining area of subsistence-level existence. The battle between Price and John is decades old, with links to the children's vanished mother, and is as much a battle for the soul of an individual as for a plot of land. It is this agonising constriction, like one of the hunter's bows John stretches to tautness, that Mozley emphasises.
If John is the "Robyn Hode" of legend, Cathy and Daniel are his "scrawny vagrants", running wild in the ancient forest that surrounds their home. It is a hard life but, in Mozley's telling, an enchanted one: rich and gamey with dark cuts of animals hunted for food, cider and roll-ups, singing till dawn and "skylarks on toast, almost whole, with mugs of hot, milky tea". Daddy has built 8a fortress and a flawed paradise, in which Cathy--a mixture of Bronte-esque wilfulness (the name is surely no coincidence) and fearless warrior princess, with hair as "black as Whitby jet" and eyes "blue like the North Sea"--strives to protect her younger brother.
However, even as their precarious shelter is under siege, Daniel and Cathy are changing. Cathy is most resistant to adaptation. Like Daddy, she had "an outside sort of head"; like him, she is a loner. Daniel, though, is drawn to the world of learning and culture, as demonstrated by Vivien, an unlikely acquaintance of Daddy who gives the children informal lessons. Vivien influences Daniel in other ways, too, for this is a novel about not conforming to stereotypes, be they gendered or otherwise. Daniel's long hair and sense of curiosity and delight in his body contrast with Cathy's awkwardness in hers, her fatalistic awareness that as a woman she is vulnerable, a target: "We all grow into our coffins, Danny. And I saw myself growing into mine," she tells him, just before the book's violent culmination.
Brutal, bleak, ethereal, Mozley's novel combines parable with urgent contemporary truths about dispossession and exploitation. Reading Elmet leaves the metallic taste of blood in the mouth: centuries old, yet as fresh as today.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Taylor, Catherine. "The story in the soil." New Statesman, 18 Aug. 2017, p. 52. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA504340538&it=r&asid=69417f9238f7b3c7a7b8997dea13373c. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A504340538
Strength and protection; Fiction
424.9052 (Aug. 5, 2017): p64(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Young and gifted
"DADDY and Cathy and I lived in a small house that Daddy built with materials from the land here about." From this apparently simple premise, Fiona Mozley (pictured) unfurls a dark and delicate fairy-tale of contemporary Britain that has propelled "Elmet", the young author's debut novel, onto the longlist for this year's Man Booker prize for fiction.
The novel takes its title from the Celtic kingdom that once covered Yorkshire, where ancient forests harboured mythical green men and one "Robyn Hode". In Ms Mozley's vision, vestiges of that tooth-and-claw order still exist in today's world: the powerful prey on the weak in lawless pockets of the country. Her novel pits an odd family of squatters against the local landowner in an isolated copse that, like the depressed neighbouring towns, cannot be seen by passengers streaking by on the London-to-Edinburgh railway line.
Narrated with almost fanatical precision by Daniel, the 14-year-old son, the book draws readers into the family's "strange, sylvan otherworld" on the margins of society. "Daddy" has withdrawn with his teenage children--motherless, untutored, nearly feral--to the woods. A "bearded giant" who once served as the landowner's enforcer, Daddy is a towering figure, a Robin Hood with huge fists. He fights other men for cash in hidden remnants of the wild that are frequented by travellers and others scrabbling to survive.
Each carefully chosen detail illuminates the novel's themes of violence and exploitation. Yet far from being bleak, "Elmet" is beautiful. Ms Mozley writes with clarity and insight, and her descriptions of the natural world and human relationships are both specific and profound. Alongside the pervasive brutality there is innocence, intimacy and love. To his children, John Smythe stands as a defender and protector. "That, after all, was why Daddy had moved us here," Daniel explains. "He wanted to keep us separate, in ourselves, apart from the world."
Alas, the world will not let them be. With very few missteps, this accomplished novel builds to a devastating conclusion. Like another great work about a family on the margins, "Housekeeping", the 1980 debut by Marilynne Robinson, an American novelist and essayist, "Elmet" is a quiet explosion of a book, exquisite and unforgettable. It is hard not to feel that at 29, Ms Mozley has only just begun.
Elmet.
By Fiona Mozley.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Strength and protection; Fiction." The Economist, 5 Aug. 2017, p. 64(US). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA499810099&it=r&asid=717777ef1f2bba261be922bd442dcf4b. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499810099
Book Review: Elmet by Fiona Mozley
It’s quite an achievement for a debut novel to be shortlisted for the Man Booker prize: Juliet Martin argues that it’s no coincidence
Fiona Mozley's debut novel Elmet has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
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by Juliet Martin
Friday October 6 2017, 12:00am
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Trains make wonderful writing spaces. On Fiona Mozley's quotidian commute from York to London, watching farmland morph into the dilapidated eyesores of urban decay under an anaemic weekday sunrise, a Man Booker shortlist novel was born. I'll admit I stray slightly from the facts in this romanticised portrait of Elmet's origins. With enviable productivity, Mozley did write her fable of childhood and family allegiance on a train bound for the capital, but the jury's out on the exact details of the view from her window seat. I'm perhaps not far off, if the unadorned Yorkshire landscapes which form such an integral part of this excellent novel are anything to go by.
At its essence, Elmet is a coming of age story set against the smoky woodland canvas of grim up-north gothic. Our narrator is 14-year-old Danny who, along with his feral sister Cathy, has moved to a house in the forest built for them by their Daddy. This isolation in a 'strange, sylvan otherworld' becomes a sanctuary for the curious family. It is a life cut off from law and modern society in favour of chopping wood for campfires, bows and arrows and the humane slaughter of rabbits. In Danny's plaintive words, 'We just want to be left alone.' But the modern world of power, corruption and legal property rights is not so easy to escape. Soon the local landowners begin to close in and, escalated by snatches of Daddy's dark past and Danny's fugitive future, the story becomes a desperate struggle for survival.
Mozley avoids triteness by spiking this fairytale with an arresting, often twisted realism.
This novel possesses atmosphere in abundance. Characters seem to spring directly from their remote surroundings and Mozley combines rural austerity and human violence with a striking, Bronte-esque vitality. Take Danny's father, referred to throughout as Daddy. At once, we see that this intimate moniker is at odds with his hulking physicality: he is 'gargantuan' with a 'cavernous chest' and 'Goliath arms', a prize fighter 'more vicious...than any leviathan of the ocean'. Yet Daddy, compellingly realised, is no doltish brute. There's undeniable nobility in his desire to shelter Danny and Cathy from venal capitalist civilisation, his wish to 'strengthen [them] against the dark things in the world', as Danny puts it.
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For me, the book's exploration of class conflict is one of its core strengths. Mozley vividly captures the grit and grime of socio-economic hardship in the plight of the town's downtrodden and underpaid farm labourers, subservient to landowning plutocrats like the slippery Mr Price. A clandestine fireside conspiracy is a standout scene, where the townspeople come together in unified resistance. Moreover, the ancient feudal hierarchy of tenant and landowner in the novel contributes to a sense of timelessness. We are drawn deeply into the wintery stasis of the woods and grow used to Daddy's primal, back-to-basics way of life. References to Land Rovers, supermarkets and lottery winners come as intrusive anachronisms. This is Elmet's other great accomplishment: we are made to feel, as Danny and Cathy do, the encroachment of hostile, intolerant progress.
Of course, there are areas which lack this finesse. The backstory is too often relayed in repetitive exposition, or else left patchy. Casting Danny as the narrator muddies the waters between lucid authorial presence and the account of a fourteen-year-old still learning to express himself. Exquisitely crafted description sits alongside clumsy but, in light of the speaker, more accurate statements such as 'the air was wet with salty water'. I also confess that I find myself impatient when the italicised text signals a shift back to Danny's present. They remind the reader that the bulk of the novel is relayed in flashback, a dramatic device which helps vary pace and texture, but often makes the present-day sequences feel underdeveloped.
Yet these are minor faults, easy to forgive in light of the novel's dazzling evocations of place. A lonely cottage in the forest, two carefree children splashing in rockpools; such passages of prose are written with lyrical artistry, yet Mozley avoids triteness by spiking this fairytale with an arresting, often twisted realism. The cottage later becomes a crime scene. As the story builds to a fallout of heat-rending familial fracture, we are left considering the morality of the novel's old and new worlds, and which we would choose for ourselves. If we are permitted the choice at all, that is: remaining impervious to the progression of society is shown to be futile. 'Millions of men had died dancing in the old style'.
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Book Review: The Art of Rivalry by Sebastian Smee
For the common reader, predicting the Man Booker winner is always a game of guesswork. But whoever takes the prize this year, it's pleasing to see debuts such as Elmet up there alongside the works of familiar, big-name authors. In its poetic imagery, thoughtful consideration of class politics and haunting depiction of rural Yorkshire, this powerful novel more than deserves its place on the shortlist
Elmet: a dark, bloody, astounding novel from Fiona Mozley
This moving tale set against a violent background has more than earned its place on the 2017 Man Booker longlist
31 Aug 2017
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Lincolnshire, England. Picture: Alamy
Elmet
by Fiona Mozley
JM Originals
Fiona Mozley is 2017’s bracing new name on the Man Booker longlist. Like Graeme Macrae Burnet, the bracing new name on 2016’s longlist, she made the grade with a strange, violent novel about outsiders battling for survival in the British wilds.
Elmet, as Ted Hughes wrote, was “the last independent Celtic kingdom in England […] a sanctuary for refugees from the law”. This isn’t a bad way to consider Mozley’s hero, John Smythe, whose hobbies include bare-knuckle boxing and hunting for the food he puts on the table. That he picks fights and has even killed “in the peat fields of Ireland or that black mud of Lincolnshire” is something he shares evenly with his children, Daniel (our narrator) and Cathy, his Brontesque daughter.
Smythe is at perpetual war with the world, mainly to escape its clutches. So he builds a house “with materials from the land here about”, but without permission of the landowners, a tension that builds towards the novel’s tragic climax.
Arguably Elmet’s nearest recent literary equivalent is Jerusalem (2009), Jez Butterworth’s prize-winning play about a motley crew of travellers that interrogated modern England by rewinding to the ancient. Elmet is darker and bloodier but, thanks to Daniel’s narration, also moving in an unexpected fashion. An astounding, haunting debut.
Rural life as social realism, with a touch of the suspense thriller: Elmet reviewed
Fiona Mozley’s debut novel is an old-fashioned portrayal of gender privilege and agrarian thuggery
Houman Barekat
(image: istock)
Houman Barekat
16 September 2017
9:00 AM
Elmet
Fiona Mozley
John Murray, pp.311, £10.99
Daniel and his big sister, Cathy, do not go to school. They live with their father, a gargantuan former prizefighter, eking out an autarkic existence as squatters on land belonging to the unscrupulous Mr Price; on a typical day they are engaged in woodwork, plucking mallards or tickling trout. Price’s personal fiefdom operates outside the law of the land, with violent henchmen enforcing his will. The children’s father had once worked as a fixer for him before turning renegade, rallying Price’s exploited workers and tenants into collective action to improve their lot. Price’s vendetta against him is pursued with icy determination across the pages of Fiona Mozley’s debut novel: ‘He must return to the fold. I used to own that man’s muscles, and I owned his mind.’
Elmet casts a clear nod to Leveller radicalism, but its salient feature is its pointed portrayal of gender privilege. The tone is set in an early chapter, when Cathy briefly disrupts a boys’ football game. Having caused a scene by entering the field against their wishes, she decides against taking part: ‘Even if she played, and even if she played well, it would always be their game.’
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The story is narrated by Daniel, but Cathy is its undisputed heroine. Daniel is diffident and effete, whereas his sister, preternaturally strong despite her slender appearance, has inherited their father’s steeliness. Harassed and roughed up by Price’s entitled sons, her fearless resilience forms the moral centre of this tautly written folk-tale redux.
The backdrop is a tableau of agrarian subculture, where traveller lads on dirt bikes use ferrets to hunt rabbits, and labourers let off steam in a black economy of illicit fights, angling and horse-racing. The milieu’s carny charm is tempered by the ever-present menace of thuggery. If Mozley’s evocation of rural life bears some of the hallmarks of social realism — the dialogue is in Yorkshire diction, with ‘doendt’ for ‘don’t’ and ‘wandt’ for ‘wasn’t’ — Elmet is closer to a suspense thriller in its pacing and structure.
Cathy is an intriguingly unconventional heroine, but the novel’s broad narrative thrust is far from transgressive: protagonist and pals vs cartoon baddie and his cronies. Its longlisting for this year’s Man Booker Prize is unsurprising, as it fits the Booker mould perfectly: engagingly plot-driven, with just enough cleverness to get you thinking, but not so much as to trouble you unduly.