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WORK TITLE: The Ship
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.antoniahoneywell.com/
CITY: Buckinghamshire, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; children: four.
EDUCATION:Manchester University, graduated.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Worked at the Natural History Museum, London, and Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Taught English, drama, and film studies at Watford Grammar School for Girls and at North Westminster Community School. Has run creative writing workshops and education programs for children.
WRITINGS
Has written a musical and a play, which was performed at the Edinburgh Festival.
SIDELIGHTS
Antonia Honeywell took to writing early in life. As she stated on her website, she wrote her “first novel at the age of eight, in Mrs. Burgess’ class at Benson Primary School.” She continued: “It was about a small red plastic counter making its way through a game of Snakes and Ladders. I remember feeling the sensations of the counter as the dice throw meant that the snake was inevitable; I also remember the frustration of trying to communicate that feeling in words, and the sense that it was of paramount importance to succeed.” Honeywell studied English at Manchester University and then took jobs at the Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She went on to become a teacher and taught English, drama, and film studies at the Watford Grammar School for Girls and then at North Westminster Community School. She also ran creative writing workshops and education programs for children.
Honeywell’s love of writing finally led her to try her hand at another novel. In The Ship, a dystopian tale set in London, sixteen-year-old Lalla is growing up in the midst of the collapse of civilization, sheltered from its worst horrors. Her father is carrying forward a plan to escape by ship. Loaded with supplies and five hundred chosen few, the ship will travel out to sea and an uncertain future. Everdeen Mason, writing in the Washington Post, found this an “eloquent tale” that “raises thought-provoking questions about the difficult task of growing up.” Lalla goes from a comfortable life of certainty to one filled with dread and trauma. In the course of their escape to the ship, her own mother is killed. A Publishers Weekly critic called it a “mixed bag of beauty and vexation” with “a guttwisting epilogue that will appeal to lovers of psychological speculative fiction.”
Carol Birch, critic in the London Guardian remarked that “Honeywell’s debut is ambitious and well written and provides endless possibilities for debate.” Contributor to the Los Angeles Times Swapna Krishna found this a “thoughtful and luminous look at what happens when we get everything we thought we wanted.” Lalla has escaped aboard ship with shipmates who don’t look back. “Why, then, can’t she let go of the land she left behind? Why can’t she stop dreaming of the future?” Krishna described these as some of the “difficult questions that Antonia Honeywell asks through in her powerful debut novel.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Bookseller, February 27, 2015, Rebecca Watts, review of The Ship, p. 20.
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2017, review of The Ship.
Publishers Weekly, February 27, 2017, review of The Ship, p. 82.
Washington Post, April 17, 2017, Everdeen Mason, review of The Ship.
ONLINE
Antonia Honeywell Website, http://www.antoniahoneywell.com/ (October 23, 2017).
Guardian (London, England), https://www.theguardian.com/ (March 7, 2015), Carol Birch, review of The Ship.
Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com (April 28, 2017), Swapna Krishna, review of The Ship.
Welcome to my website
antonia-honeywell Back in Summer 2013, an intense fortnight took me from aspiring author to author with agent and book deal. I’d been dreaming of being published since I was eight, and actually working at it for a decade. My blog tells the story, but if you don’t have the time or inclination to read it, the summary is simply this. Write. Write more. Cross it out and write again. Weep and rage, then get back to the writing. If you need a sounding board or just a virtual hand to hold – or indeed if you’ve been there and have advice or comments – please use Twitter or the comments section here to get in touch. The Ship was published on 19th February 2015, and I wrote a monthly blog about the process of taking it from manuscript to published novel. You can read a brief synopsis here.
I also blog about my reading, and about anything in the news that catches my eye.
I’ve got four small children, and although I tend to keep them out of my writing life, they’ll inevitably creep in somewhere – usually in the form of tips about writing in spite of them. This is to be interpreted as an indication of my commitment to writing, and not as an indication of my lack of commitment to them. For they are wonderful.
Whatever brought you here, thank you for coming. Stay awhile.
Antonia Honeywell
antonia-honeywell-outsideI was born to two people who loved each other; unfortunately this didn’t last, so I’ve largely written off my childhood. Life really began when I went to Manchester University, aged eighteen, to study English.
However, I did write my first novel at the age of eight, in Mrs. Burgess’ class at Benson Primary School. It was about a small red plastic counter making its way through a game of Snakes and Ladders. I remember feeling the sensations of the counter as the dice throw meant that the snake was inevitable; I also remember the frustration of trying to communicate that feeling in words, and the sense that it was of paramount importance to succeed. That novel was never published, chiefly because I had to get changed for rounders.
I never gave up writing, but my failure to emulate Zadie Smith upon graduation meant that I had to earn a living another way. I started out in the Education Department at the Natural History Museum in London, then realised that the Education part of my job had become more and more interesting, and went off to train as a teacher.
I taught for ten years. During that time I wrote a play and took it to the Edinburgh Festival; I wrote a musical (with Rob Chalmers, the Head of Music at Ashcombe School, where we both worked at the time); I was Head of English, Drama and Film Studies at Watford Grammar School for Girls, and finally at North Westminster Community School (which needs an entire section to itself, and is now an Academy). I loved teaching and was lucky to find, not a career, but a vocation. I miss it.
But I fell in love, and in 2004, I got married. Four children later, I’m working as hard as ever. I’ve kept my babies fed and warm and loved, but I’ve never stopped writing. Sometimes I even get some sleep, although now that I have secured that longed-for book deal, life looks all set to shift again.
I’ve always hoped that one day, everything would make some kind of sense. But now, after four decades on this beautiful planet, I realise that the sense isn’t in my gift. All I can do is the best with what I’ve been given, and to help others along the way. I hope that The Ship will be a success and that I’ll publish more novels in the future. I hope that, as a published writer, I’ll get the opportunity to teach again in a different context. I’ll certainly always be glad to hear from schools who would like a writer to visit, as well as from book groups, libraries, bookshops, creative writing courses, writers both published and aspiring, and anyone who enjoys reading.
Thank you for reading. Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to hear about, or hear more about – after all, if life is not about making connections, what is there left?
Book World: These dystopian science fiction stories show us all the ways the world can end
Everdeen Mason
The Washington Post. (Apr. 17, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
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Full Text:
Byline: Everdeen Mason
The charged political climate has sparked renewed interest in dystopias like "The Handmaid's Tale" and "1984." Three new science fiction books capture our taste for storylines involving societal or environmental collapse in a future that has begun to feel perhaps not so distant.
[...]
Antonia Honeywell's debut novel, "The Ship" (Orbit), takes place in a frightening vision of the near future: Bangladesh is underwater, food resources are scarce and a totalitarian government can barely hold society upright as people struggle to survive. Sixteen-year-old Lalla has two loving parents who have provided for her and shielded her from the worst of Earth's decline. Yet she misses things she's never had, like school or fresh fruit. When her father completes his ultimate plan - to shelter 500 carefully selected people on a massive ship with every luxury they could ever need - Lalla is forced to face new uncertainties. Desperate to understand where the ship is going, struggling to feel safe and enjoy life even when she knows others are suffering, Lalla slowly unravels. Honeywell's eloquent tale raises thought-provoking questions about the difficult task of growing up, no matter the time or place: What do you do when the people you trust will no longer listen to you? What do you do when they're wrong?
Honeywell, Antonia: THE SHIP
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Honeywell, Antonia THE SHIP Orbit (Adult Fiction) $26.00 4, 25 ISBN: 978-0-316-46985-2
A sheltered teenager has an existential crisis while riding out the apocalypse aboard her father's private ark in this
dystopian debut novel.Sixteen-year-old Lalage "Lalla" Paul lives comfortably in a secure flat with her wealthy parents,
Anna and Michael. Outside, the environment is in ruins, resources are scarce, and the military-run government
performs mass executions to reduce the population. Intent on providing a better life--and eventual death--for his family,
Michael purchases a ship, stocks it with supplies, and selects 500 virtuous people to fill its berths; Anna, however,
maintains it's their moral obligation to stay in London and help the less fortunate. When someone shoots Anna through
the living room window, Michael and Lalla carry her onto the ship, where she succumbs to her injury. The ship's
passengers then do battle with British troops and a starving mob before heading out to sea. Michael (who becomes a
quasi-cult leader known as "Father") encourages his new flock to forget the past and enjoy the present, but Lalla
stubbornly refuses, whining about the lack of adversity, fixating on what's happening back home, and obsessing over
where the ship is headed. Even falling in love isn't enough to distract the petulant, ungrateful Lalla from her endless
cycle of adolescent angst and petty rebellion. After a harrowing launch, Honeywell's tale sails into the doldrums and
sinks under the weight of haphazard plotting, uneven pacing, and subpar character work.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Honeywell, Antonia: THE SHIP." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482911851&it=r&asid=a253444ea078206dda74ae88036fb662.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A482911851
10/8/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1507498691442 2/3
The Ship
Publishers Weekly.
264.9 (Feb. 27, 2017): p82.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Ship
Antonia Honeywell. Orbit, $26 (336p) ISBN 9780-316-46985-2
"I was born at the end of the world" is how 16-year-old Lalla Paul of London begins her story. Though civilization is
rapidly dying around her, her parents--mainly her wealthy and connected father, Michael, inventor of a major computer
network censorship tool--manage to keep her sheltered from the worst of it. Michael has a plan in the form of a ship
that's large enough to carry them and 500 others, along with years' worth of supplies, out to sea and safety. But once
aboard the ship, Lalla is traumatized by tragedy, unsettled by her father's slow transformation into a messianic figure,
overwhelmed by love, and concerned about the long-term prospects for survival. Honeywell's lyrical descriptions of
Lalla's thoughts and the ship itself are haunting, and quite grim when Lalla questions their plans and her father's
influence. But Lalla's adolescent vacillating about different aspects of ship life can get tiresome, and the reader might
eventually sympathize with the characters who are frustrated by her. This mixed bag of beauty and vexation has a guttwisting
epilogue that will appeal to lovers of psychological speculative fiction. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Ship." Publishers Weekly, 27 Feb. 2017, p. 82. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485671193&it=r&asid=a2842c9351807be59a726eaf493aa9e4.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485671193
10/8/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1507498691442 3/3
Antonia Honeywell: The Ship
Rebecca Watts
The Bookseller.
.5658 (Feb. 27, 2015): p20.
COPYRIGHT 2015 The Bookseller Media Group (Bookseller Media Ltd.)
http://www.thebookseller.com
Full Text:
ANTONIA HONEYWELL
THE SHIP
Oiion, 12.99 [pounds sterling], 9780297871491,
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The Ship is a complex and challenging novel that paints a bleak and quietly disturbing vision of the future. Questions of
control and freedom are explored, though no easy answers are given and the reader is constantly bombarded with moral
and ethical dilemmas as Lalla tries to reconcile these problems against her relatively privileged and sheltered
upbringing. Antonia Honeywell has created a frightening dystopia that is sure to stay with the reader long after they
have finished the book. The Ship is a novel that would make for fascinating book group discussions.
REVIEW BY REBECCA WATTS FOR WELOVETHISBOOK.COM
Watts, Rebecca
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Watts, Rebecca. "Antonia Honeywell: The Ship." The Bookseller, 27 Feb. 2015, p. 20. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA403785795&it=r&asid=cb0bb56fc2825106b490dd45a3167b5d.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A403785795
The Ship by Antonia Honeywell review – a dystopian dilemma
Survivors navigate the end of the world in an ambitious debut that will prompt debate
Antonia Hollywood
Leaving London … Antonia Honeywell’s protagonists flee the capital in a not-too-distant future. Photograph: Peter Bentley
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Carol Birch
Saturday 7 March 2015 07.00 EST Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 06.50 EDT
Sixteen-year-old Lalla “was born at the end of the world” in London, sometime in the not-too-distant future. Food is tinned or dried. Floods and fires have wreaked devastation; parks are now shanty towns and the dispossessed have taken over the British Museum. The masses can be officially culled. Nothing grows; the seas no longer support life. Cannibalism exists in parts of the world and people breed algae in urine to eat.
Lalla is sheltered, living with her parents in a high-security flat with enough to eat and sterilised water. The only people she sees are beggars on the daily trips to the British Museum with her mother to feed the destitute. Her father, Michael Paul, has brought to secret fruition his master plan, the outfitting of a ship big enough to keep 500 carefully chosen people alive for at least two decades. Escape is not without casualties, but hopes are high as the traumatised group of international passengers set sail. They feel themselves blessed, with vast stocks, a doctor and dentist, a cinema, a sports hall, book groups – groups of all kinds. But hope turns to unease for Lalla. Where are they going? Why does no one ask questions? Why must they discard personal possessions, the marking of time, even memory? Most disturbing of all is Michael’s evolution into a messiah figure, the saviour they call Father.
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She rebels, notching up the days on her cabin wall, clinging to mementoes. She is troubled by the people left behind. The news shows the gassing of the crowds at the British Museum, women holding up dying babies at the windows. On the ship, they respond by destroying the mast that receives TV signals and adopting a be-here-now philosophy. “We all miss things,” says Tom, Lalla’s sketchily drawn boyfriend, “but they are all part of where we are now.” “Time no more” becomes a catchphrase, as does “Don’t look back”.
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Lalla won’t have it: they must go back and do something. She is not sure what – just not this. The ship, she believes, is “not escape from hunger but the cause of it”. Who’s right?
An eternal cruise with rotas, group meals, healthy communal activities and inspirational talks may seem like hell. But it is still a tough choice between that and cannibalism and the algae. And it would have been even tougher had Antonia Honeywell (pictured) left more hope for the masses; instead, the situation appears so dire that going back seems like suicide. Everything has gone into the dystopian soup: climate change, globalisation, financial collapse, totalitarianism. There are nods to GM crops, vaccination, bees, antibiotics, but there is a vagueness about what has actually happened. The moral landscape is also broad-brush. What should we make of Tola, the daughter of Lalla’s African friend Patience? Presented as a heroine, Tola killed her own father, who had fenced his patch and fed his own family in the face of mass starvation. We don’t know what to make of her because she is little more than an example – a hypothetical conundrum of the kind that moral philosophers pose. In real situations, the devil is in the detail.
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The moral dilemma is secondary to the core coming-of-age story about a girl growing up and casting off the shackles of parental control. Father and daughter are the only fully realised characters. Michael is ambiguous, an affectionate father and husband, romantic idealist, dreamer and visionary, but also an incipient megalomaniac. Lalla is an irritating teenager who takes it as a personal affront that the world isn’t ideal, who sulks and moans and mopes about, getting on everybody’s nerves and despising everyone around her. Then again, she is only 16 and not there by free choice like everyone else. The nightmare of the ship is that its inhabitants are becoming people who can no longer make their own decisions. They are infantilised, growing down while Lalla grows up.
Honeywell’s debut is ambitious and well written and provides endless possibilities for debate. It ends on a cliffhanger, suggesting the possibility of a sequel. If there is a Ship 2, I’d like to see the inevitable chaos life on board has become, as well as the final realisation of its self-aggrandising heroine that she is just as flawed as all the rest – and that the moral landscape is a minefield whether you’re on land or sea.
• Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie is published by Canongate. To order The Ship for £10.39 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
Antonia Honeywell's novel 'The Ship' asks what happens when we get everything we thought we wanted
Antonia Honeywell
Antonia Honeywell's novel is "The Ship." (Chris Honeywell; Hachette Book Group)
Swapna Krishna
The thought of getting on a ship and leaving our civilization behind, with all its faults and drawbacks, may seem appealing in the current political climate. However, as Antonia Honeywell shows in her debut novel, “The Ship,” it comes with its own complications.
Sixteen-year-old Lalla lives in a dim future where global warming and the effects of climate change have ravaged the planet. The British government has fallen apart, replaced by an oppressive regime obsessed with keeping track of its citizens. Your registration is everything; without it, people aren’t entitled to food, a home, or even a place in society. To be on the streets without a registration card is to risk being shot where you stand. Lalla’s parents have shielded her from the horrors of the world she lives in, but she knows they’re out there.
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There is a bright spot in all of this misery, though: the ship. All her life, Lalla has heard from her parents about the ship that will take them away from the monotony inherent in the constant fear of current existence. It’s their escape plan, their chance to start over.
Lalla isn’t sure whether the ship exists or if it’s a false myth created to give her hope. However, all of that changes on her 16th birthday. “I thought about the ship, and the promise of friends, and suddenly I needed to know, more than anything else in my limited, safe, grey world, that the ship was more than a theoretical hereafter for the hopeless,” she thinks. And so, finally, she tells her parents she’s ready to leave.
The true nature of the ship is revealed gradually over the course of the novel, and Lalla is disturbed by what she finds. Once on board, with her father as the ship’s leader, she’s moody and distrustful. Her emotions rise and fall with the waves.
“The Ship” is a thoughtful and luminous look at what happens when we get everything we thought we wanted. Lalla is safe on the ship. She has all her material needs provided for, someone to love her, shipmates to care for her. The people around her are content to forget the horrors back home, to live only in the present. Why, then, can’t she let go of the land she left behind? Why can’t she stop dreaming of the future?
It’s both illuminating and incredibly frustrating. Lalla is difficult, willful and mercurial. At times I wanted to scream through the pages at this teenage girl, ask her why she can’t appreciate what she has. Her parents have sacrificed everything so that she can be safe and warm and dry. How dare she ask for more? How dare she wallow in her unhappiness?
But Honeywell is too talented an author to leave the discussion there. Through Lalla, the reader is forced to ask: Is mere survival enough? Yes, bellies are full and there is no imminent threat of death, but is a life only defined by the material things you have worth living? Particularly when what you have is mindlessly provided to you?
These are the difficult questions that Antonia Honeywell asks through in her powerful debut novel. The stream-of-consciousness style makes it not the easiest read, and Lalla can be a frustrating window on this world. But in the end, it’s a provocative novel with difficult questions about the fundamental nature how people choose to live their lives.
Krishna writes about space science and technology for Paste Magazine and science fiction/fantasy for Syfy Wire. You can find her on Twitter @skrishna.
“The Ship”
Antonia Honeywell
Orbit: 336 pp., $26