Hay Festival Dhaka
Granta Best Young Novelists
“Belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story's supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real.”
With this mission statement in mind, Granta, one of the most prestigious literary magazines and publishers in the United Kingdom selects 20 young British novelists, and marks them as names to watch out for in the future. The first list was published in 1983 and since then, this recognition of emerging writers has been repeated every decade in the UK and other countries such as the United States and Spain.
This year's Hay Festival in Dhaka invited two of Granta's Best Young Novelists (2013) to speak about their inspirations, writing process and experiences related to their published work. “In 2013, for the first time the list showed more women than men and a significant number of writers whose Britishness was hyphenated with another country of origin,” said the moderator Ellah Allfrey, former Deputy Editor for Granta Magazine as well as a judge for selecting this year's list of promising authors, as she invited Tahmima Anam and Ned Beauman to stage.
Ned Beauman's debut novel Boxer, Beetle was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award in 2010 and for the Desmond Elliot Prize in 2011 and won the Writer's Guild Award for best fiction. “This novel, tells the complicated story of a seventeen year old mystery involving boxers, beetles, eugenics and fashion,” says Allfrey. Ned's second novel, the teleportation accident was long listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2012. It has elements of the history, romance and science fiction. “It's been called a pyrotechnical hectic extravaganza, and as Beauman's protagonist faces the challenges of living in an interesting time,” she explains.
Beauman's signature lies in his intricate plots and adventurous characters. When asked about his writing process he says, “It is definitely the plot that comes first. My threshold for complicated plots is higher than others. With the teleportation accident however the plot had become so convoluted as I wrote that at one point I had no control over where it was going to go.” As both his novels were set in the 1930's, it was a matter of interest as to why the author preferred this time period during the Second World War. “One of the reasons is psychoanalytic. My grandparents were at the holocaust, something my mom hates to talk about. It was there during my upbringing but not really spoken about, and I suppose that's why it interested me more.”
While Beauman wrote about what was unspoken in his household, Tahmima Anam, winner of the best first book in the 2008 Commonwealth Writers Prize as and short listed for the Guardian's first book award, did exactly the opposite. “I was inspired in my family by the things that were spoken,” she says. “In Bangladesh we have this interesting relationship to the past and to the war in that some ways it's over articulated and in others it's unspoken. There are certain aspects of the war that we don't talk about but on the other hand it is one of the major sources of literature, music, culture, of remembrance, it's the kind of site from which everything else seems to emerge. Both of those things were on my mind when I was writing both novels.”
Anam's first novel tells the story of the experience of one family, and more particularly, the experience of one woman during the Liberation War of 1971. “I believe that like my protagonist, many of the women who were present during 1971 and were very much a part of the movement but were not recognised as people who won battles or joined political parties or made the speeches,” says Anam, who has spoken to many such women, who were not only victims of violence, but were also played unspoken heroic roles by protecting revolutionaries and playing their own role in the war. By writing about the history of Bangladesh, Anam is reclaiming a country she was not raised in, but felt to be her own.
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