Marlborough LitFest and English Literature at Bath Spa University are delighted to announce the winners of this year’s national Love Books competition, which invited participants to celebrate their love of reading by explaining their choice of favourite book, poem or play in either words or a video. With over 120 entries in its second year, winners in each of the three competition age categories have won £300, with runners-up winning £100 each.
One of LitFest’s aims is to celebrate the power of reading to shift perceptions and to open up opportunities. As part of this, LitFest has been working with the English Literature Department at Bath Spa University on an annual competition to encourage people of all ages to share their passion for a book, poem or play they love. They could do this either in a piece of text of up to 750 words or in a video up to four minutes in length. The 2021 competition was open to anyone across the country in three age groups – 13-16 years, 17-19 years and 20 years and above – and LitFest is especially grateful to
teachers at local schools for encouraging their classes to take part.
In the 13–16 age group category, the winner is Grace Clift who wrote about The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. The runner-up in this group is Xavier Baldwin, with a rap about William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies.
The winner in the 17-19 age group category is May Liu Cannon (from St John’s Academy, Marlborough), whose entry was Orlando, by Virginia Woolf. The runner-up is Filippo Rossi with The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco and a Highly Commended prize is awarded to Eleanor White (from St John’s Academy, Marlborough) for her entry on Strange the Dreamer, by Laini Taylor.
In the 20+ age group category, Emily Foster has won for her writing on Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson; the runner-up is Sara Clemence who wrote about Labyrinth, a collection of short stories and essays by Jorge Luis Borges.
Bath Spa English lecturer Dr Nicola Presley and her student volunteers were involved in sifting the entries in 2021. A shortlist was then passed to three judges: Jan Williamson, former chair of Marlborough LitFest; Judy Golding, CEO of William Golding Ltd and writer; and Ian Gadd, Professor in English Literature at Bath Spa University.
Nicola Presley, Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Bath Spa University, said: “It has been a real pleasure to read all the entries for this year’s Love Books Competition. We have been moved, delighted and inspired by the passion shown by the entrants.”
Genevieve Clarke, Chair of the Marlborough LitFest, said: “Once again we were thrilled at the number and quality of entries for this competition and delighted that so many people get involved in Marlborough and beyond. We’re extremely grateful to Nicola and her colleagues and students in the English department at Bath Spa University for having made this happen for LitFest.”
Love Books 2022 will launch in the new year; keep an eye on marlboroughlitfest.org for more information on how to submit entries.
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2021 LOVE BOOKS WINNERS AND RUNNERS-UP ENTRIES
WINNER 13-16 AGE GROUP: GRACE CLIFT
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
With themes of adolescence, psychiatry, womanhood and the painstakingly relatable experience of lacking direction, Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’ is unforgettable. “The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.” Esther Greenwood is a bright college student, working on a magazine in New York with eleven other college girls. The food is expensive but paid for, the parties are loud and all night, the selection of boys is plentiful; life should be everything she’d dreamed of. But she feels utterly broken. As she attempts to conform to what she thinks young adult life of a pretty girl should be, the book follows Esther’s descent into what she calls “the bell jar”; her mental breakdown. One of the themes that make ‘The Bell Jar’ a book I just couldn’t put down is the emptiness of convention. Esther obsesses over her future, and how she can fit into the perfect life she believes she must attain. Her trip to New York was expected to be glamorous and perfect, but she finds herself feeling unable to escape an unsettling feeling of numbness, occasionally broken through with danger and fear. Men were supposed to be honest and kind, but she’s consistently mistreated, and even when she isn’t, it’s never the perfect romance that she envisioned. Her future was a green fig tree of experience and excitement, but Esther watches in desperation as “the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” To put it in her words, “I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”
Reading this book in an age where conventionality is growing its presence in media; in college requirements; in social standards; I kept having to pause and reflect on how utterly relatable Esther’s thought patterns were at the beginning of the story. She believes she’s the only person who thinks the way she does; who has little direction; who feels lost; who hasn’t fallen in love; who’s terrified of losing herself in growing up. From the perspective of a teenage girl, this story struck me with its painful honesty on how being a girl can be completely frightening. However, I think that everyone who has stepped foot on the Earth can understand the disorientation that being alive brings.
Later in the book, Esther begins to whirlwind into something I cannot relate to personally, but the articulation of her thoughts and what she viewed as rational was truly heartbreaking. At multiple times, I just wanted to reach through the pages and hold onto her. If you do decide to read ‘The Bell Jar’, which I avidly encourage you to do, I recommend researching for trigger warnings before you begin, as there’s some incredibly heavy topics and descriptions included. But the beauty in which Sylvia Plath vocalizes these experiences is truly astounding. Whether you live in luxury and happiness consistently, or are in the darkest place you’ve ever been, it’s difficult to not empathize with Esther; and it’s mainly down to Plath’s meticulous characterisation that’s ever specific to human nature. With a mixture of relatability, agonizing storytelling, and a sense of adolescent honesty, ‘The Bell Jar’ is one of those books that is difficult not to love. While most good books pull you into a story, ‘The Bell Jar’ goes one step further and lets you pull yourself out of it. After you’ve done the dishes, after you’ve gone to bed, you’ll still be reflecting on that one quote that hits you hard. It’s a book that makes you look up and think about the world; a book that makes you angry, and sad, and truly hopeful. I will leave you with my favourite quote from the book, that I think encapsulates what it’s like to feel connected with being alive. “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
RUNNER-UP 13-16 AGE GROUP: XAVIER BALDWIN
The Lord of the Flies Rap
It’s gritty, it’s raw, it’s violent and more
The conflict and savagery, the blood and the gore.
No limits, no boundaries, no morals, no care
The brilliant Lord of the Flies ….read if you dare.
Surrounded by freedom, beauty and sea
Yet a battle takes place from which no one is free
Civilization versus savagery and..
The loss of their childhood through death in the sand
From this intensity, I long to be freed
A colourful masterpiece, a haunting must-read
Paradise no more, self destruction takes place
Moving and memorable, their fear I can taste
This is a story of darkness, not hope
The sheer longing for rescue from air or from boat
The story of humankind really appealed
As I longed to find out if the Beast is revealed
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WINNER 17-19 AGE GROUP: MAY LIU CANNON
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
When you first learn to talk, the language you learn is all you know. As you grow older, language becomes your medium to navigate the world – you argue with your parents, you confide in your friend, you write essays for school. When a pandemic hits and you can no longer hug your grandma to tell her you care or cry on a friends’ shoulder, the language you acquired at birth quickly becomes your map, your way of sustaining all you have lost.
And then, when the only way you can talk with your grandad in China is over a disconnecting Facetime, and your only form of communication your own broken Chinese, you begin to wonder at the importance of language itself. Never before had you tried to consider the beauty of your own language or the wonder in others. When I picked up Orlando, a short, formless novella, I suddenly understood the abilities, meanings, and images of my mother tongue. “The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went”: this is one of my favourite quotes, in which we can see Woolf’s complex understanding of the English language, the way in which it can be structured to convey the most wonderful sentiments, such as the fleeting nature of beauty and love. Feeling inadequate in Chinese and strangled in a lockdown world where texting and emails were your only form of connection, the language of Orlando reminded me that linguistics do not exist only for communication, but to accomplish something more abstract and beautiful.
Woolf’s wondrous words aside, her examination of gender is itself remarkable; indeed, they are challenging even in the complex world of modern gender politics. As Orlando moves from being a male Elizabethan aristocrat, to a non-binary tribal foreigner, to a female high society Victorian, questions arise in the reader that we might never have thought of before. What is gender? Woolf critiques, prods at and tackles the concept itself. She demonstrates, brilliantly, the clear constraints of the women and the more hidden, tragic constraints of the man. Orlando, after becoming a woman, realises “women are not obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled by nature. They can only attain these graces…by the most tedious discipline”- when I read these lines, I actually gasped. I felt understood and validated in these sentences and the many other comments Virginia makes on the tedious aspects of female existence – without a doubt, although written in the 1920s, the book is more than relevant to modern concerns about gender. Then, I felt a sense of equal validation in Woolf’s love of being a woman; asking “Which is the greater ecstasy? The man’s or the woman’s?… this is the most delicious” (here, Orlando is exploring the world as a woman for the first time). Woolf goes further than any other author I have read in resisting the easy ways out of the themes she is grabbling with. I think that it could be very easy to discuss gender in an almost clichéd manner, but nowhere in Orlando did I feel I was reading anything other than Virginia’s own complex and nuanced thoughts. She forces the reader to think, and rethink, and finally to accept that, like literature and like life, there is no clear answer, just more questions.
Pretention in literature can often leave a sour taste: Personally, I found other Modernist writers such as Fitzgerald, with their slightly trying too hard attitude, irritating. Woolf, however, in the complete absurdity of Orlando’s life, opens the door for us to laugh at and with her, to forget and let go our preconceived notions of the ‘sentence’, and indeed of the form of the novel as a whole. Whilst in her other writing, Woolf might be accused of being too philosophical, too wordy, in Orlando she has fashioned a creation too bizarre to be a biography, and too anachronistic to be a regular novel. Her nudge-nudge-wink-wink manner of writing flourishes when she allows herself little to no constraints – whether those constraints be on form, language, or humanity itself.
Orlando has stayed with me since I finished the book. It reminds me, when I feel inadequate, that the world is ridiculous. After you have read and enjoyed a novel about a hermaphrodite time traveller who writes poetry, which is actually about a real aristocratic garden designer (Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville West), the mundanity of your own life might actually become a bizarre form of comfort.
RUNNER-UP 17-19 AGE GROUP: FILIPPO ROSSI
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Imagine a secluded medieval abbey, rising out of the Italian Alps during the bitter winter of 1327. It is run by the Benedictines, with its own cellarist, herbalist, miniaturists, scholars… Oh, and a forbidden library which is intertwined with the lives of a dozen monks, who are found dead while trying to posses a mysterious book within it…
Welcome to The Name Of The Rose.
William of Baskerville, a wondrously learned Franciscan monk, is already faced with a difficult task: mediating a vital theological and political debate. The aim of which is to reconcile the warring Imperialist powers and the delegation of Pope John XXII led by the brutal inquisitor Bernard Gui. It is a fragile, yet vital attempt to placate the raging chaos of early 14th century Italy.
But, as William reaches the abbey in the company of his novice Adso of Melk, whose first person account constitutes most of the novel, he finds himself tasked with the arduous quest of understanding the contorted and overwhelmingly complex mind orchestrating a frightful chain of events before it is too late…
This is Umberto Eco’s first novel and what a novel it is!
Following its publication in 1980, it immediately rose to fame as an award-winning and critically acclaimed international phenomenon. A novel which, over the years, can be said to have been a major influence for the conception of countless new brilliant works of international literature including Orhan Pamuk’s much-loved thriller: My Name is Red.
Now, forty years on, I find that this thrilling historical mystery has matured with more relevance than ever before. The social, cultural and political turmoil of 1327 which resonated so well with the upheaval of 80s Italy is as shocking as it is disturbing in its close thematic resemblance with today’s global landscape. A landscape of extremism, impending ecological breakdown and growing tensions exacerbated by the precarious atmosphere of the fragile days we live in. Ours too is complicated time in which, as Adso writes: “the truth, we see in fragments, through a glass darkly” while “blind men lead equally blind men towards the abyss”.
To me, the pervasive control of knowledge as seen in the maniacal censure of books in the abbey echoes far too well the obscure monopolisation of data in the modern age. Today’s extensive databanks appears to be no less controversial than Eco’s secret library designed as a labyrinth for the mind and body in order “not to distribute knowledge, but to delay its appearance in the world”. After all, like in the novel our society too is becoming increasingly vulnerable to partial truths, deformed beliefs and inexcusable lies as the ravaging outbreak of ‘fake news’ in the digital age shows us all too well.
Even though The Name Of The Rose shares many of the exhilarating aspects of The Da Vinci Code, it is only a distant uncle of Dan Brown’s popular success. Eco’s novel is a literary novel after all. But one woven with such skill that the result is a brilliant tapestry of meaning which functions on multiple levels of understanding. As a result it remains accessible to a wide readership while still containing an abundance of material to stimulate even the most advanced of readers.
This is because Adso’s candid account, other than being a brilliantly executed marriage of fiction and history, navigates through a labyrinthine time of power misuse, violent oppression and impending reform. As a result it ineluctably raises probing questions about all aspects of the human condition, ranging from dilemmas on individual freedom to the subtle boundary between good and evil, ethics, metaphysics and the immense power knowledge has to control and shape the consciousness of the individual and society.
Eco’s brilliant mind and lucid wit as a renowned semiotician shines through every page in the form of William’s beautiful logic, as he engages in an unforgettable pursuit of truth and meaning in words, symbols, ideas and every other conceivable sign in the known universe. In forcing us to question our deepest assumptions and certainties, William’s irresistible charm affectionately accompanies us on a cunning and sophisticated journey of discovery. One which inevitably resonates with our own, personal quest for truth and thirst for meaning in our own difficult time, making it impossible not to fall in love with this novel from the very first page.
HIGHLY COMMENDED 17-19 AGE GROUP: ELEANOR WHITE
Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor
Most myths build up slowly, washing over the stone foundations of our beliefs until the surface flakes away and they bury themselves in our history, seamlessly straddling the line between truth and fiction. As the past recedes into the distance, that line wavers, and finally vanishes, and what is myth and what is reality loses all definition. Yet somehow Laini Taylor has emulated this same atmosphere in a few hundred pages, with only words and ink and a talent that stretches and condenses the feeling of time and myth into a single book. Strange the Dreamer is a dream and a fairy tale all in one, and the magic it weaves lingers long after the last page is turned. It tells of gods and monsters and dreams and nightmares, all drawn with writing more delicate than a moth’s wing, yet as alluring and powerful as a siren’s song.
‘Without his books, his room felt like a body with its hearts cut out’
Enter Lazlo Strange, an orphan, a librarian, a dreamer, obsessed with the lost city of Weep which faded from existence long ago. He spends his days learning its language, poring over its crumbling trade documents, longing to fulfil the dream that shadows him day and night. His earnestness and intense goodness endears him to us, the reader, even if his naivety is the scorn of many around him. Yet it is Lazlo who is proved right when the chance to visit the city which has haunted him for so long arises, though his hopeful idealism is soon quashed when it is revealed that Weep is still steeped in the shadow of the terror and cruelty of the rule of gods.
‘I turned my nightmares into fireflies and caught them in a jar’
Flip the page, and we have Sarai, living suspended above the city, herself and her siblings the last remnants of the traumatic rule of the gods, symbols of the oppression its people have faced, despite themselves having participated in none of its horrors. Blessed – or cursed – with a unique magical gift, Sarai lives vicariously through others’ dreams, twisting them into nightmares at the will of her bitter and angry sister, Minya. Her chapters exude loneliness and longing, a desire to forgive when she feels obliged to hate, and above all a deep need to experience the world outside of all the pain caused she feels she is perpetually drenched in.
‘Like nightmares, dreams were insidious things, and didn’t like being locked away’
I read this book when I needed a myth. The atmosphere of this book now feels like a part of me; every time I read it I feel utterly submerged in its world. The characters exist as a sort of presence at the back of my mind, so that this book feels like the mythology of my life, even though I only read it for the first time a few years ago. But the thing about myths is that they need to be shared, and the magic of this book only extends as far as its readers. Imploring you to read this book feels almost an understatement; I long for the lyrical and whimsical nature of this book to be stitched into our literary history, so that one day this beautiful fairy tale crafted by a single person will permeate the lives of all its readers, past and present, because its timelessness threatens to outlive us all. If I could leave behind a single novel to acknowledge the passing of my life, I would wish it could be this one; if I could have written any words, I would want it to be these. But as that honour falls to its author, Laini Taylor, I can only be the instrument through which this book is passed to others, through which the myth becomes reality.
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WINNER 20+ AGE GROUP: EMILY FOSTER
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
If you ask my parents, they’ll tell you that as a kid I had no interest in reading at all. While my older sister was blasting her way through books, reading way above her age range, I was happy playing outside getting grass stains and falling off the swing.
On long car journeys we would usually listen to audiobooks. Again, I usually paid little attention to these, they were to entertain my dad more than anyone, to give him something to listen to while he was driving. I slept through countless audio versions of Inspector Morse and Brideshead Revisited, not understanding any of it. Then, one day, my dad came back from paying for petrol with a brand-new tape clutched in his hand. I didn’t know it then, but this spur of the moment purchase was going to change my life forever. Putting the tape in the player it spoke those immortal words, ‘Treasure Island by Robert Lewis-Stevenson’.
From the start I was hooked. This wasn’t some kids picture book, this was a story. It had adventure, characters, and an atmosphere so rich I could see the ocean, smell the salt, feel the sand between my toes. I couldn’t believe it when my dad said it was available as a book. That couldn’t be possible, books weren’t like this, books were boring and involved a lot sitting still and staring at black on white.
I’m not going to say the first book I ever read was Treasure Island, I certainly wasn’t that precocious, but it was the story which made me realize books were something exciting.
Flash forward to present day and I have three copies of Treasure Island on my bookcase. My original copy, worn and battered from the amount of times I’ve read it cover to cover (and dropping it in the bath definitely didn’t help!), a copy I bought at university because I just had to read it again but hadn’t had the space to bring any books to my accommodation, and a fancy, hardback copy I treated myself to just because it was beautiful.
As a kid I loved it because it was a thrilling adventure the likes of which I had never seen before, but as I got older I’ve realized there’s so much more to it than that. It’s a coming of age book about a timid, thirteen-year-old boy finding his courage and overcoming adversity, but it’s also a deep look into desire and greed and how the promise of wealth can change a person. In the end the fabled treasure map doesn’t lead the pirates to the piles of gold and doubloons they had been dreaming about, it leads them to an empty hole in the ground. They throw themselves into it like they’re throwing themselves into their own grave, scratching around in the dust with their fingernails, almost driven mad by their greed.
Indeed, Ben Gunn, the poor pirate who had been marooned on the island, had spent much of his time searching for the treasure before digging it up and dragging it back to his cave. But it’s done nothing for him being trapped on the island all alone with nothing but his money. He’s half insane and more than anything wants human company. The treasure means nothing without people.
Even at the end of the story, when the good guys have won and the bad guys have lost, they’ve loaded the gold on the ship and set sail for home, the triumph is not that they are all rich, but that they are alive. Jim makes no mention of how much he receives or what he does with it because it’s unimportant. He outright says that no force on Earth would get him to return to the island for the caches of silver still left buried there. He has no desire for more money. In fact, the story ends on a sombre note which shows the reader that, despite being the object all the characters were dreaming about, the gold bought Jim nothing but nightmares.
To this day, Treasure Island is still my favourite book of all time, though I can slightly blame it for the fact I no longer have space on my bookshelf and bookshops get more of my money than I care to admit. But it started a life-long love affair with stories and books that has shaped who I am as a person, and that’s the real treasure here.
RUNNER-UP 20+ AGE GROUP: SARA CLEMENCE
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
Lock-down life creates its own labyrinths of surreal thought, and already lost, slightly unhinged and unravelled, I enter Borges’ labyrinth with no ball of string and a bad sense of direction. But Borges, master storyteller, entices me artfully along his forking paths, as perspectives move, time and reality shift. In lucid, flowing accounts of things that have never happened, but could have, might do, somewhere, sometime, I determinedly follow Borges deeper and deeper into his labyrinth.
Borges transforms the convincing every-day into a liquid state; sometimes his meaning trickles through my fingers, or surges over me and I merely bask in his intellect and the beauty of his words. In the labyrinth, the veil between worlds is thin, it wavers and flickers, comes and goes, but Borges’ writing is substantiated with seeming reality – solid, credible narrators, quoted authors (who may or may not exist), stories within stories, books never written accompanied by seemingly dependable footnotes. Borges taking ‘lazy pleasure’ in ‘useless and out-of-the way erudition’ playfully, teasingly, warns us not to take it all too seriously. At some turn, I accept ‘what the Greeks do not know, incertitude’, a concept that my twenty-first century brain rebuffs but discovers that this unsurety surely fits with this unstable present.
Fearing the diminishment of the imagination and individual energy, Borges is an author for today. He lived through both World Wars and the Peron regime (‘Peron was a humbug. And he knew he was a humbug.’) and the Junta. He had the real experience and we had Evita. He witnessed the danger of unchallenged belief and totalitarian regimes grow into something monstrous.
Blind by the age of fifty-two, Borges could see beyond the everyday more clearly. His colourful world became a world of quivering shadows and insight and every word became ‘a tool’. In his mind’s eye Borges travels to places known and unknown, and his vision is so vivid that I travel with him and sometimes sense I have been there too. I experience dark, romantic, hazy nights in Buenos Aires, which might be Cordoba, or Arabia and feel the ‘intimate light’ of a street, understanding ‘there can be no better way of naming tenderness than that soft rose colour.’ Borges weaves his intellectual enchantments under Latin stars tempered by Anglo-Saxon roots, and intertwines Buddhist, Taoist, Christian, Kabbalist and philosophical notions of time and space, karma, reincarnation and the circulatory nature of the world.
Pierre Menard rewrites Don Quixote in the exact words of Cervantes; but of course, he writes a different book, written at a different time, by a different author and read by a different audience who may also have read Cervantes’ Quixote. Heraclitus’ river is always changing; the reader is never the same. In The Secret Miracle Jaromir Hladik faces the Gestapo firing squad and searches for God in a library in a dream. In all the treasury of books, he finds God in a ‘worthless’ atlas in ‘one of the tiniest letters’.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a notional world that through the illusion of lost, non-existent, not-yet-written manuscripts, esoteric scholarship and the media, becomes real in mankind’s susceptible, credulous mind (and appears preferable to our tangible world). Just one of Borges’ sophistries or is this virtual reality now?
I weep for Asterion, the Minotaur, (The House of Asterion) who lives the narrative he has been fed, locked in his own delusion of superiority, a prison of deceptions – of corridors and mirrors – and my heart aches for his life of lonely fantasy, the only escape from which is the welcome blade of Theseus’ knife. I sigh for him and us, exasperated by our own historical delusions.
I cling to my shaky semblance of self, to a comfortable notion of temporal time, fearing (or wishing) I may never re-surface from The Library of Babel (‘The Universe’) which contains all books – labyrinthine in themselves – that exist or will ever exist, in every tongue, all held in this timeless spiralling sphere of hexagonal galleries; all written with the same symbols jumbled into different words, senses and meanings. Perhaps it all makes sense or none of it does. Lost in the twists and turns of the unquestioned absurdity, the veracity and voracity of the wordsmiths, I soar ‘upwards to remote distances’, or make the vertiginous fall, plummeting into the abyss of infinity.
Eminently quotable, addictively readable and sometimes inscrutable, negotiating Borges’ paths has left me going round in diverting circles. No matter, after all, it is all just passing time.
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