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| Author | Natasha Soobramanien, Luke Williams |
|---|---|
Publication date | 25 May 2022 |
| ISBN | 9781635901627 |
Diego Garcia is a novel by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams, published in 2022 by Fitzcarraldo Editions, which won the Goldsmiths Prize that year. [1] [2] [3] It is the first collaborative novel to win the prize. [4]
The book tells the story of two British friends, both writers, who, after meeting a poet named Diego, learn about the forced expulsion of Chagossian people from their island homes between 1968 and 1973 by the British government, to make way for a US military base. They feel the urge to write about this as well as the continued resistance of the Chagossians.
Tom Gatti of New Statesman wrote that "Political narratives are questioned, social structures reimagined and, in this exhilarating, generous novel, the act of storytelling is made new". [5] The book was reviewed in The Guardian , [6] Buzz Magazine , [7] The Times Literary Supplement , and [8] 3:AM Magazine . [9]
The Chagossians are an Afro-Asian ethnic group originating from freed African slaves brought to the Chagos Islands, specifically Diego Garcia, Peros Banhos, and the Salomon island chain, in the late 18th century as well as people of Asian descent. Under international law, they are the indigenous people of the Chagos archipelago. Most Chagossians now live in Mauritius and the United Kingdom after being forcibly removed by the British government in the late 1960s and early 1970s so that Diego Garcia, the island where most Chagossians lived, could serve as the location for a United States military base. Today, no Chagossians are allowed to live on the island of Diego Garcia or anywhere in the Chagos archipelago, despite many of the islands they used to inhabit being over 160 km away from Diego Garcia.
Paul Beatty is an American author and an associate professor of writing at Columbia University. In 2016, he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Booker Prize for his novel The Sellout. It was the first time a writer from the United States was honored with the Man Booker.
Benjamin Myers FRSL is an English writer and journalist.
Canongate Books is an independent publishing firm based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Rachel Cusk FRSL is a British novelist and writer.
Gwendoline Riley is a British writer.
Diego Garcia is an atoll in the Chagos Archipelago, a part of the British Indian Ocean Territory.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
Kevin Barry is an Irish writer. He is the author of three collections of short stories and three novels. City of Bohane (2011) was the winner of the 2013 International Dublin Literary Award. Beatlebone (2015) won the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize and is one of seven books by Irish authors nominated for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award, the world's most valuable annual literary fiction prize for books published in English. His 2019 novel Night Boat to Tangier was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize. Barry is also an editor of Winter Papers, an arts and culture annual.
Sarah Ladipo Manyika FRSL is a British-Nigerian writer of novels, short stories and essays and an active member of the literary community, particularly supporting and amplifying young writers and female voices. She is the author of two well-received novels, In Dependence (2009) and Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream To The Sun (2016), as well as the non-fiction collection Between Starshine and Clay: Conversations from the African Diaspora (2022), and her writing has appeared in publications including Granta, Transition, Guernica, and OZY, and previously served as founding Books Editor of OZY. Manyika's work also features in the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
Myriad Editions is an independent UK publishing house based in Brighton and Hove, Sussex, specialising in topical atlases, graphic non-fiction and original fiction, whose output also encompasses graphic novels that span a variety of genres, including memoir and life writing, as well political non-fiction. The company was set up in 1993 by Anne Benewick, together with Judith Mackay, as a packager of infographic atlases.
Evelyn Rose Strange "Evie" Wyld is an Anglo-Australian author. Her first novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2009, and her second novel, All the Birds, Singing, won the Encore Award in 2013 and the Miles Franklin Award in 2014. Her third novel, The Bass Rock, won the Stella Prize in 2021.
Leone Ross FRSL is a British novelist, short story writer, editor, journalist and academic, who is of Jamaican and Scottish ancestry.
The Goldsmiths Prize is a British literary award, founded in 2013 by Goldsmiths, University of London, in association with the New Statesman. It is awarded annually to a piece of fiction that "breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form." It is limited to citizens and residents of the United Kingdom and Ireland, and to novels published by presses based in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The winner receives £10,000.
Eimear McBride is an Irish novelist, whose debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013 and the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.
The Echo Chamber is the debut novel of Scottish author Luke Williams, published in 2011. The Saltire Society awarded it the Scottish First Book of the Year prize that year. As revealed in the book's acknowledgements, two of the chapters, extracts from the diary of Damaris, a young woman and Evie's first lover, were written by a friend, Natasha Soobramanien.
Luke Williams is a Scottish author, whose first novel The Echo Chamber won the 2011 Saltire Society's Scottish First Book of the Year award. He co-authored a book with Natasha Soobramanien, titled Diego Garcia, which won the Goldsmiths Prize in 2022. Williams teaches Creative Writing at Birkbeck.
Natasha Soobramanien is a British-Mauritian novelist who received the Goldsmiths Prize in 2022 for her novel Diego Garcia.
Natasha Brown is a British writer who lives in London. Assembly (2021), her first novel, won a Betty Trask Award, was Foyles Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for several other American, British, and English-language awards.
Assembly is a novel by British writer Natasha Brown published in 2021.
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