The Green Carnation Prize 2016 shortlist features queer magical realism from Kirsty Logan; Stella Duffy’s story set in the South London slums of 1912; an insider account of the Aids epidemic by David France; a debut novel exploring loneliness and isolation from Garth Greenwell; and Kei Miller’s story of racism and inequality in Jamaica.
The five shortlisted writers are at various stages in their careers – from debutant Greenwell to Duffy’s 73rd writing credit – but have all been acclaimed: Logan’s second appearance on the Green Carnation shortlist; Duffy’s OBE for contribution to the arts; Academy Award and double Emmy nominee France; trained opera singer Greenwell’s debut novel has been nominated for eight literary prizes; and Kei Miller was the winner of the 2014 Forward Prize.
John Boyne, chair of judges, said: ‘These five books combine great storytelling with poetic language and authentic voices. Individually, each one has the power to move the reader while collectively they display the extraordinary diversity at play within the literary work of the LGBTQ community. It’s been difficult to narrow all the books down to five; it will be even harder to choose a winner.”
Now in its seventh year, the prize, with the support of Foyles, seeks to champion the best writing by an LGBTQ author in the UK. It is a vital recognition and celebration for books as diverse as the community it represents and unified by a common thread: sheer quality of writing.
Last year’s winner was Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings. James said: “Six years ago I wouldn’t have been able to voice that I was LGBT, so to be recognised for that and for work the judges felt was great is fantastic.”
The winner will be revealed at a ceremony at Foyles’ flagship bookshop in London on May 22nd.
The Green Carnation Prize 2016 shortlist in full:
London Lies Beneath, Stella Duffy (Virago)
Based on a true story set in south London in 1912. Tom, Jimmy and Itzhak may come from different cultural backgrounds but the three boys have one thing in common: the streets of Walworth in which they were all raised. Their futures seem set. Each will follow in his father's trade and adapt to a life where extended family overlaps within bustling narrow streets. But the pull of the Thames is strong and it is Tom in particular whose heart is set on a life at sea. Soon they are on a journey that will alter both their lives and their community.
Inspired by real events, this is the story of three families, and a tragedy that will change them for ever. It is also a song of south London, of working class families with hidden histories, of a bright and complex world long neglected.
Author Biography
Stella Duffy OBE has written thirteen novels, over fifty short stories, and ten plays. She has twice won Stonewall Writer of the Year and twice won the CWA Short Story Dagger. HBO have optioned her two Theodora novels for television. In 2014 Salt published her short story collection, Everything is Moving, Everything is Joined. In addition to her writing work, Stella is a theatre-maker and the co-director of the international Fun Palaces campaign for greater access to culture for all. In 2016 she was awarded an OBE for services to the Arts.
How to Survive a Plague, David France (Picador)
The story of the AIDS epidemic and the grass-roots movement of activists, many of them facing their own life-or-death struggles, who grabbed the reins of scientific research to help develop the drugs that turned HIV from a mostly fatal infection to a manageable disease. Around the globe, the 15.8 million people taking anti-AIDS drugs today are alive thanks to their efforts.
Not since the publication of Randy Shilts’s now classic And the Band Played On in 1987 has a book sought to measure the AIDS plague in such brutally human, intimate, and soaring terms.
Author Biography
David France is the author of Our Fathers, a book about the Catholic sexual abuse scandal, which Showtime adapted into a film. His documentary How to Survive A Plague was a 2012 Oscars nominee, won a Directors Guild Award and a Peabody Award, and was nominated for two Emmys, among other accolades.
What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell (Picador)
On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher walks down a staircase beneath Sofia's National Palace of Culture, looking for sex. Among the stalls of a public bathroom he encounters Mitko, a charismatic young hustler. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, and their trysts grow increasingly intimate and unnerving as the enigma of this young man becomes inseparable from that of his homeland, Bulgaria, a country with a difficult past and an uncertain future.
Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You is a debut about an American expat struggling with his own complicated inheritance while navigating a foreign culture. It tells the story of a man caught between longing and resentment, unable to separate desire from danger, and faced with the impossibility of understanding those he most longs to know.
Author Biography
A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Garth Greenwell holds graduate degrees from Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was an Arts Fellow; before that Greenwell studied music and trained to be an opera singer. His short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, A Public Space, StoryQuarterly, and VICE. His novella Mitko won the 2010 Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and a Lambda Literary Award. Garth Greenwell lives in Iowa City, where he holds the Richard E. Guthrie Memorial Fellowship at the University of Iowa.
A Portable Shelter, Kirsty Logan (Random House)
In their tiny, sea-beaten cottage on the north coast of Scotland, Liska and Ruth await the birth of their first child. Each passes the time by telling the baby stories, trying to pass on the lessons they've learned: tales of circuses and stargazing, selkie fishermen and domestic werewolves, child-eating witches and broken-toothed dragons.
But they must keep their storytelling a secret from one another, as they’ve agreed to only ever tell the plain truth. So to cloak their tales, Ruth tells her stories when Liska is at work, to a background of shrieking seabirds; Liska tells hers when Ruth is asleep, with the lighthouse sweeping its steady beam through the window.
Author Biography
Kirsty Logan is a writer, performer, literary editor, writing mentor and book reviewer. She is the author of a short story collection, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales, and one novel, The Gracekeepers. She regularly performs her stories at events and festivals throughout the world. She lives in Glasgow with her wife and their rescue dog.
Augustown, Kei Miller (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Ma Taffy is blind. She sits on her porch, listening to the residents of Augustown go about their lives. This is not the Jamaica of white-sand beaches and swaying palms, but a poor, oppressed shanty town in the sweltering centre of the island. It is home to people freed from slavery but kept down on the lowest rungs of society by the white, and nearly-white, population through poorly paid jobs that they cannot escape.
Ma Taffy has known tragedy in the past, and can sense oncoming danger. As she sits on her porch, she can feel the approach of her grandson before she can hear him. She knows that a terrible thing has been done to him, and that it will have an irreversible effect on Augustown.
Kaia’s pale-skinned school teacher has cut off his dreadlocks in the classroom, in front of his classmates, with a pair of rusty scissors. No greater insult or humiliation can befall a Rastafarian than to have his dreadlocks sliced away. This act will spark the “Autoclaps”, the appalling event that Ma Taffy can already sense.
Augustown is a story of racism, inequality, and a class of people trying to rise up above the forces that have kept them low for so long.
Author Biography
Kei Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978. He has published two novels, The Last Warner Woman and The Same Earth, which was picked for the Waterstones Book Club, as well as several collections of poetry and a book of short stories published by Macmillan Caribbean, The Fear of Stones, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. In 2014, he won the prestigious Forward Prize for Poetry for his collection, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. He lives in London and teaches Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.
