Literary Prizes and Persecution: A Conversation with Mona Arshi
“Writing should have no borders, but the reality is that many writers today are persecuted for their ideas and speaking out about them.”
Mona Arshi is a Human Rights lawyer and applauded poet, as well as one of the judges of this year’s The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.
Photo credit: Svetlana Cernenko
First, I wanted to say congratulations on being a judge for the Young Writer of the Year Award! What does being a judge - both for this prize and the previous prizes you have judged – mean to you? And how have you found the experience of judging the Young Writer of the Year Award so far?
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all my judging duties. I’ve judged quite a few book prizes now and I guess I keep saying yes because I am genuinely interested in what’s being published, but with the Young Writer Prize, there’s also an added curiosity about what younger writers are doing, what their concerns and preoccupations are, and how they are navigating those themes in their work.
The shortlisted authors have been described as ‘four young writers who have taken huge risks with style, subject and form and who have set themselves free of publishing conventions. All of them have taken on unpromising subjects and produced works of great beauty and generosity that refuse to be bent into shape.’ Is this sense of a resistance to convention something that you admire in the literature that you read? And is it something you aim for in your own work?
I think that all of the four shortlisted book were bringing something new to the table and each of them in their respective genres are skilled at what they do, but yes, I do think that each of those books also risked something in the making of them, and as a reader I appreciated that. Literature, including fiction and poetry, have to keep moving; that doesn’t mean that we necessarily have to do away with convention, but just mine the terrain differently. That was what was so exciting about discovering these writers.
How have you found the process of switching between reading analytically and critically and reading for your own pleasure? Does one experience affect the other?
Yes, it’s very difficult! Strangely enough, the advantage I have is that I don’t come from a literature background. I trained as a lawyer first and I would actively seek out books that I could derive pleasure from or in which I could find some connection to the world. It has never been a chore or an obligation, but in recent years, it has become more difficult as I read so much. But I still relish that moment when you are fully immersed; you’re under the spell of the skilful narrator or a voice of a poem, and those are the magical moments that bring me back to books.
How would you define the value that literary prizes hold in the more general goal of encouraging people to engage with literature?
I think they have become increasingly important, but I personally feel you need a mix of things to ensure good books find their readers. Of course, readers will often turn to the tiles on the prize lists, but of course it can be such a subjective exercise and it often depends on who the judges are. It sounds very basic to say, but I think judges – much like agents and editors – have a responsibility to be really open about their reading and to go to all four corners of the literary landscape. I also think we need a healthy reviewing culture in magazines to centre brilliant writing. Equally, I’ve been really fascinated and encouraged by independent bookshops hand-selling books they love, some of which might not have a lot of marketing attached to them, and I have found some wonderful books, often from smaller publishers, this way.
In addition to the Young Writer of the Year Award, are there any other prizes that you feel are particularly successful in championing literary voices?
The Goldsmiths Prize is one I’ve always kept an eye on. I tend to read most of the shortlisted books and it’s really heartening to see a prize that allows books that might be doing something different, although I’m reluctant to use the word experimental!
You have also had the experience of literary prizes from the author’s perspective, as your debut poetry collection, Small Hands, won the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2015, and your debut novel, Somebody Loves You, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize last year. Do you find that such accolades give you additional confidence, or do they lead to an added layer of pressure when you sit down to write?
Prizes are lovely if you win or are shortlisted for one, but the work of the next book has to go on and you have to find a way of tuning out all the noise that has nothing whatsoever to do with the writing. I personally haven’t found it an extra pressure and mostly try to forget about it.
The theme of this issue of our magazine is Resolution, and one of the ways we have been exploring this subject is through characters and authors who have shown resolve and defiance in the face of conflict, adversity, or censorship. With your background as a Human Rights lawyer and as a poet who has been involved in certain political movements and causes, I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the act of writing and sharing literature as an act of resistance in itself?
This is a really important question and one that preoccupies me quite a lot. I have become involved in PEN international who have a role in protecting imperilled writers outside the UK. Today it operates across five continents in over 100 countries, with 147 centres supporting the unhampered transmission of thought within each nation and between all nations. Writing should have no borders, but the reality is that many writers today are persecuted for their ideas and speaking out about them. It’s pretty chilling to think that an idea that travels through the imagination and then is transmuted into words can be silenced and shut down by a state like this. We should never take our freedom of expression rights for granted, and it is vitally important that we have solidarity with writers abroad that risk so much.
And lastly, a question we ask every author we speak to – do you judge a book by its cover?
Ah yes… Inevitably, I do, but also, I try and give the first page of the writing a chance, even if I really don’t like the cover!
