2022 LITFEST LOVE BOOKS COMPETITION WINNERS AND RUNNERS-UP
13-16s WINNER
Astrid Wilson-Gignoux
Reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch
She sits (with her back to the window, her left foot resting on the bedpost below, her back curved like the arc of a wave) and reads. Every so often she stretches the crick in her neck, moves her hair from the dip between her eyes and the sloping bridge of her nose, and glances at the people passing on the street below. A dog has surreptitiously done what it shouldn’t have in the mud of the path (the owner is irritated but more anxious about the disparagement of his neighbour advancing towards them); a small, unprepossessing, boy in green khaki shorts is failing to fish his plastic buggy out of the stream. They are amusing but not consuming. Her protagonist – Dorothea – is far more nuanced in her disintegrating naivete, a far more lucrative prize to comprehend. So she returns to her book.
She is coming to the denouement and yet all is still written in tranquillity, with unfaltering precision. Words hang perfectly on Dorothea’s silken figure, following her every step without impeding her movement – without appearing masterful or painting her as a puppet. The entangled lives of Middlemarch run haphazardly through her hands – or through Eliot’s? She seems to feel the quicksand presence of fingers clasping a pen, dipping in ink, an enigmatic flick of magnanimous wrist at the decision to bring the two lost lovers together in the drawing room at that moment, to counteract Casaubon’s insensitive buffoonery with Will’s confusion and heartache, to delve into Mary Garth’s independence. The world dissolves at Eliot’s loom and is remade into a weave of such depth, of such integrity, of such detail. Will Ladislaw’s unthinking forays into the viper’s nest – that tumultuous couple Rosamond and Tertius Lydgate – are balanced with his amiability towards our own Dorothea (whose disastrous match with the out and out villain Casaubon is redeemed by her unflinching thirst for knowledge). We are not pushed to our limits as a reader, we are simply lead to the window and told what we don’t look hard enough to see on the everyday street.
Someone shouts downstairs and she straightens herself out. She has homework, violin practise, life, to be getting on with. But the image imprinted on her brain (of that woman staring with love at the hunched old man shrugging off the dawn and starting on his mountain of ploughing) is effervescent. She smiles. Only the greatest of writing can produce joy at the piecing together of a sentence. Not a word is out of place, or a scene misaligned. Middlemarch is real, Middlemarch is there hidden in the downs somewhere. `That scuffed old cover appears no more than a door to a different world.
13-16s runner-up Phoebe Taggart
M A X
Just imagine, if you were in a fourteen-year-old girl’s body, being stripped in front of boys and girls aged four-sixteen, being held down, prodded against your will, nothing you could possibly do to stop it, that wouldn’t get you killed. Seems like a nightmare, well for many, it was reality.
Max is a book set in World War Two, a story of a boy that starts off with him in the womb, ending with him around eleven years old.
When I was reading Max, I felt as if I was part of the story. Like I was companions with Max and Lukas, that I went on their adventures, played their games, and went through their hardships alongside them.
This book really changed my perspective on how the German children also suffered and were brought into this world thinking that Hitler was a caring, strong, and ‘good’ leader. He was in fact, none of those things. He was powerful and influenced many people but not in the way we see as right today. I really saw that many, many young children were harshly affected by World War Two.
The chapter that really stuck with me, was where all the children, including adolescents. They had to strip naked and were poked and prodded, shaved and tattooed. Stripped from their privacy, identity, and self-confidence. Some were killed.
In a way I feel like I relate to Lukas the most because he has many emotions and yet he can’t understand how express them. He also sees himself as the underdog, so he acts like he’s the best. He finds himself lonely at times, but Max always manages to pick his mood up. I admire him for his courage and willingness to do things dangerous and fearless when others don’t. Lukas puts others before himself and manages to pull it off in the most calm but powerful manner. I admire him for his selflessness, respect for others and playfulness, despite experiencing such a horrifying time.
Even though this book was fiction, I really felt I learned so much and made me so aware of the horrors that many people were exposed to.
M A R I E
the white walls,
the painted plaster, peels.
my arm hair stands up,
i’m stood here.
vulnerable.
mama said this would never happen to me,
papa said he would keep me safe.
brother told me it would be okay.
they were wrong.
they’re dead,
and now i’m stood here.
vulnerable.
screaming,
crying.
the sound of hard hands, slapping soft cheeks,
gun shots.
Disadvantaged.
boys protesting*,
but why?
but how?
i wish i had that courage,
the courage to stand up to Hitler.
disadvantage.
i try to remember what mama told me,
“be brave, stand up for you, don’t give up…”
except, that’s not what she had said at all,
“be quiet, do what they say, don’t talk back…”
i close my eyes.
i turn around to look at my brother for one last time,
he smiled,
he never smiles,
unless something bad is about to happen.
i close my eyes.
i looked down at my soft skin,
bare,
bony,
black.
the colour of my stupid skin,
the colour of his stupid skin,
will kill us both.
not a chance.
the soldier takes one look,
shoves me,
pulls me,
i can feel a cold metal barrel,
pressing against my temple.
this is it.
i look up at all the other lifeless souls,
staring into mine,
their blonde hair and blue eyes,
reflecting onto me,
black hair and deep, dark brown eyes.
this is it.
pressure,
seizes throughout my body,
i can’t go yet,
“i’m only a child”
i scream at the top of my lungs,
i’m only a child…
————————————
The white walls,
The painted plaster, peels.
Laying in my bed,
I’m reading this,
I’m Safe.
Teacher said to read it,
Papa said he didn’t care.
Brother said it didn’t matter,
Mama wasn’t there.
And now I’m laying here,
Vulnerable.
As I read,
I begin to imagine what it might be like,
To not feel safe,
To feel vulnerable,
To be disadvantaged,
To close my eyes and know there isn’t a chance,
To know this is it,
When I’m only a child.
*Max and Lukas protested against the soldiers in the scene that this poem is based of (the same mentioned in the review.)
17-19s JOINT WINNERS
Eleanor Flower
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
When I first read His Dark Materials, I was seven years old. It was a book my dad had suggested, and having eaten my way through the children’s section at the library, I decided to give it a shot. I was by no means a critical reader at this age, and though I adored the characters and universes Pullman had created, I put it back on the shelf with little more than the half-formed thought that I might one day read it again.
The second time I read His Dark Materials, I was twelve. Now a little older, I was a long way from the child who had initially devoured Will and Lyra’s whacky adventures, but still a child, nonetheless. Yet when I picked it up, it quickly became apparent that while it may have been the same book, it was by no means the same story I had read five years before. What had once been words I loved for their mystery became metaphors I could link to tangible knowledge. What I had once dismissed as meaningless technobabble became energised with my (albeit limited) scientific understanding and developing analytical skills. I became obsessed with the details of the physics, or ‘experimental theology,’ of their world and yearned to understand more, to reach those branches that were still just a little out of reach. So I finished the book and returned it, somewhat regretfully, to my shelf.
The third time I read His Dark Materials, I was fifteen. Now a GCSE student, my concept of literature and analysis had deepened still, and I was beginning to develop an appreciation not just for the stories I read, but their craft and symbolism. It is perhaps most significant that I had recently encountered the verse of William Blake, whose poems preface each chapter in the final novel of the trilogy. Something of his words half familiar, I once again fond my copy of His Dark Materials and began to reread. This time, I was utterly blown away.
In those brief years, Pullman’s story had truly come to life. His comments on theology, once unfathomable, now fascinated me with their wit and direction. His exploration of authority and fate evoked new questions I had never thought to ask before. I remember becoming fascinated by the Magisterium, the authority at the heart of Lyra’s world that enforces a perpetual childhood on citizens in order to prevent the corruption that ‘dust’ (sin) instigates during adolescence. But what really struck me was Pullman’s equation of sin not with evil, but with humanity. Throughout the trilogy, Pullman asserts that while exposure to ‘dust’ can cause great suffering, it also brings about immense joy. There is a duality to love and pain, and an understanding of that is what defines us as human beings, for it would be a far greater tragedy for a person to live free of both suffering and love, than to experience both. Life is flawed and finite, but without knowledge of that, how are we meant to appreciate what we have? If we spend our lives never questioning the nature of paradise, how can we tell heaven from hell?
However, the true genius of the story comes not from the symbolism itself, but of the ways in which it reveals itself on each new read. The story of Lyra and Will is a beautiful one, one of grief and betrayal, fantasy and adventure, but above all else, it is the story of two people who grow up together, experience life, and fall in love. And in a way, this mirrors the process of reading the story itself, the reader gradually learning more and more about the plot as they themselves evolve. To a child, adolescence is a scary thing, yet Pullman philosophises that it should not be something to be feared, and certainly not something of which to be ashamed. His narrative of free will and humanity in the face of a terrible eternity is simultaneously heart-wrenchingly existential and achingly beautiful, and moves me to this day. This story is arguably a tragedy, but the poetry of the ending turns the inevitable tears into hope, if not for the protagonists, but for the worlds they gave their love to create: their very own ‘republics of heaven’.
The last time I read His Dark Materials, I was seventeen. I know now more than I ever have, and I still have so much more to learn. And I can’t wait to read it again.
Filippo Rossi
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
There exists a precious place where the pragmatism of the scientist finds itself in perfect step with the spirit of the poet. It is a rare and magical point where the unexpected may suddenly blossom… and it is from here that Levi’s remarkable collection sings.
First published in 1975 The Periodic Table remains a genre-defining work of subtly complex flavours. To even try to place it in a specific literary realm such as that of the novel, the essay, the memoir would be a step too far. The twenty one brief stories, or “micro-histories” as Levi preferred to call them, move with agile ease between forms and styles. At one time we are faced with the stance of a soaring war narrative that leads us through the “night of Europe” of the 30s, while at another the pages fill with humour and the witty anecdotes of Levi-the-chemist recalling peculiar events in his career. And interspersed in between, emerge shards of the poignant memories of an Auschwitz survivor.
All is held together beautifully by Levi’s delicate eloquence. For even though separate, the tales are exquisitely interwoven. Each one developing in the shadow of a chemical element, the properties and rhythms of which seep into the framework of the narrative, informing the narrator’s voice. For example, in Argon, the noble gas provides the ideal springboard for Levi’s evaluative history of his “inert” and picturesque ancestors, stretching from the the distant centuries up to to the modern day. Quite differently, in Vanadium, the author recalls how in the years following the Second World War, a banal coincidence resulted in a tangled and unsettling epistolary exchange between himself and a former Auschwitz SA. But above all, the true Ariadne’s thread that unites the collection lies not in the memory of the author himself, but in the passionate dialogue between a human being and the elements with which our lives on this planet are inevitably tied: “So it happens” writes the Levi in Carbon “that every element says something to someone.” And this couldn’t be more true. But does this mean that the reader needs to be well versed in chemistry to begin to make sense of this book? Absolutely not!
Although chosen as “the best science book ever” by the Royal Institution of Great Britain, The Periodic Table is not a chemical treatise that may sound distant and surgical. Nor does it bear any resemblance to popular scientific non-fiction the likes of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Instead in Levi’s experimental collection the chemical elements are approached not in a strictly informative way but much more like old friends with whom we share a rich and elaborate past. And it is perhaps this somewhat geological point of view that characterises the work and makes the whole read feel like a refuge from the troubles of our world. It does so not through escapism, but by being a comforting companion, grounded in reality, leading the reader by the hand through moments of profound difficulty and yet managing to condense from them beautiful and delicate crystals. And what more do we need in this challenging times?
20+ winner
Blaire Baily
Art & Lies by Jeanette Winterson
Sometimes we need to be saved from ourselves. In her fifth novel, Art & Lies, Jeanette Winterson produces a “seismic shock,” in the hope of prying ossified readers loose from the conventionality that binds them. Winterson goes for broke. She does what Annie Dillard counsels all writers to do: “spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time . . . give it, give it all, give it now.” Winterson goes big because, to her, there is so much at stake. In an era of cynicism, it is courageous to go so far out on a limb out of love for your reader.
The book begins and ends with light: light that emblazons; light that transforms what it touches; light that pierces, violent; unforgiving light; light that triggers a reckoning. The novel is a manifesto, an unapologetic call to arms. It urges the reader to shatter their workaday lives and escape the living death of conformity. The novel’s not so much a subtle cultural critique as an all-out attack on consumerism, cheap sentiment, small-mindedness, and stunted emotion.
Like an opera, the novel speaks through the alternating voices of three reimagined historical figures: Handel, Picasso, and Sappho. The trio are traveling on a high-speed train away from futuristic, dystopian London and toward the sea. The characters are connected in ways they do not immediately understand, including by a book within the book, but they remain ignorant of these connections, and largely alienated from one another, until the novel’s end.
The book’s main preoccupation is the relationship between art and truth (or lies). The epigraph suggests that novels are neither an imitation of the world nor a projection of what it will be; instead, novels offer actual experience—that soup of sensations, emotions, and thoughts, the combination of which does, in rare moments, move us. This is the novel as artifact: a breathing, working invention that operates according to its own internal laws and contains the actual forces that are at work in the everyday world. The novel moves back and forth along a continuum between the discursive, didactic, and logical, represented by Handel on the one hand, and the lyric, associative, and poetic, represented by Sappho on the other.
In attempting to reckon with trauma and come into her own as an artist, a female Picasso character struggles to reconcile memory, identity, art-making, and real life. Picasso’s physical home—with hidden stairs, secret rooms, and unacknowledged places—is a structural manifestation of the revisionist history adopted by her family, which refuses to acknowledge a painful secret. This is one of many examples in which Winterson imagines characters’ internal, psychological landscapes as concrete physical spaces.
Art & Lies is a philosophical novel of ideas, but it is also one of lyrical, imagistic beauty. Using close attention and fresh eyes, Winterson reveals how the familiar natural world is both alien and luminous, both particular and universal. For the characters, speaking is not just a desire; it’s an imperative: “To match the silent eloquence of the created world,” says Sappho, “I have had to learn to speak.”
The style in Sappho’s sections is overtly queer: associative, expressionistic, imagistic, playful, forceful, inventive, breathless, and urgent. Through recursion, a piling on of more and more language, Sappho’s incantatory sections verge on prose poetry. There is precision, but there is also wildness: the images are shifting, layered, and complex. Those who believe in the one-to-one relationship between word and meaning, symbol and sign, will struggle. Readers must push forward, letting the language wash over them and trusting that the experience of reading it—that intensity, free association, and confusion—is itself an act of resistance. Welcome, says the novel, to the revolution.
Art & Lies does indeed deliver the promised “seismic shock.” In describing novelists, Flannery O’Connor said “People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them.” Winterson’s hope and love are obvious: she invested tremendous inventiveness, passion, and energy into a far-reaching, ambitious book. The novel itself is like the light it describes: violent but regenerative, cutting away the inessential, refashioning the old into new life. It is rich, dense territory and it is not for the faint of heart. Critics have described it as “difficult.” And so it is. But, as Winterson wrote, and as I felt after reading Art & Lies, “What challenges me moves me.”
Jacob Hope
Rosie – Chicken or Champion?
Books can act as portals, pulling us into different worlds and opening out onto vistas that show different ways of viewing and thinking about the world we inhabit. They provide us with insights in the lives and experiences of others. Seen from the outside, however, books can be walls, barriers that keep the reader in and which block the rest of the world out. Turn a book around, however, and it becomes an open invitation for many to share and to step inside… Picture books are perfect for this, their illustrations offer an immediacy and a common experience that unites people of all ages, abilities and cultures to come together for shared opportunities for storytelling.
Too often, picture books are seen only as stepping stones towards learning how to read. They are, however, an exciting hybrid form in their own right, part visual, part verbal. Some of the earliest and most enduring recordings of human experience were made through art – cave paintings depicting hunts, or handprints using natural dyes and pigments. When we read pictures we connect with a form that our ancestors used for century after century.
Picture books bring words and images together in dynamic interplay. Sometimes they complement one another serving to tell the same story. At other times they contrast or conflict with one another, showing different perspectives and providing alternative ways of seeing or thinking. This is very true of Pat Hutchins’s book, Rosie’s Walk, a story told in economic prose with a scant thirty-two words occurring throughout the books and telling the story of a presumably ordinary, everyday walk around the familiar farmyard for a hen.
The pictures, however, tell another story and introduce both conflict and suspect to the tale. From the outset the reader sees the fox who always remains elusively out of view of Rosie, the hen and yet who is never referred to within the text. As Rosie sets out from the henhouse, readers catch their first glimpse of the fox with the red tongue peeping out showing a hungry intent. The words in the story tell us about the journey Rosie takes and the animals and object she encounters in the farmyard. The pictures meanwhile follow a clever structure where visual clues are set up as to the dangers that await fox across one spread and where page turns build a delicious sense of anticipation and suspense before the inevitable fate befalls the fox!
There’s a wonderful question around whether Rosie is truly as oblivious as she appears, or if she is in fact filled with a cunning and guile that far outstrips that of the wily fox, leading the four-legged fiend a merry dance? There’s an early introduction here to character motivation. We have the mouth-watering anticipation of fresh chicken that tempts the fox and the uncertainty surrounding Rosie’s purpose for walking around the farmyard and the possible reversal of tropes and types as Rosie rather than the fox plots and plans!
The journey itself sees Rosie leave the safety of the henhouse and explore the farmyard, a metaphor analogous for growing up and pushing beyond the confines and comforts of home and finding our own way in the world despite the dangers this might entail. The illustrations in the story use a muted yet highly distinctive palette of reds, oranges and greens perhaps drawing upon traffic-light cultural associations of danger, ambivalence or alertness and of danger. Folk art style influences run through the illustrations conjuring a pastoral idyll of a homely farmstead which contrast with some of the possible perils that face Rosie.
An alchemy between words and pictures creates a fully immersive story which has enchanted and empowered readers for over fifty years, placing them one step ahead of the written narrative just as Rosie herself remains a step ahead of the fox. Picture books are far more than just stepping stones towards learning to read, they are part personal response, part performance and offer a wholly satisfying and enlivening reading experience that all can engage in!