Elspeth Walker
Edited by Maria Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevedo
Illustration by Elspeth Walker
Jackie Kay’s The Lamplighter is a poetic radio play that explores the British role in the transatlantic slave trade, honing in on the lost voices and experiences endured by female slaves.
Allie Kerper
Edited by Ketaki Zodgekar
Illustration by Edith Pritchett https://www.instagram.com/edithpritchett_art/
Ali Smith’s novel There but for the tells the story of a man who, in the middle of a dinner party, locks himself in the spare room. The story unfolds over the course of the following year or so through the perspectives of four different characters whose lives the man, Miles, has touched in small ways. The characters whose voices comprise the story are Anna, an unemployed Scottish woman; Mark, a middle-aged gay man; May, an elderly woman with dementia; and Brooke, a 10-year-old Black girl. In each of their narrative turns, these characters reflect on experiences in their lives and how others perceive and react to them, giving the reader a rich and textured composite image of what human life can be in and around Greenwich, London in 2009-10. Smith’s novel marries realism and surrealism, satire and earnestness, and weaves it all together with wit and wordplay to create a compelling story of what it feels like to live in the political moment of the Recession.
