Burntcoat

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To enter into a world created by Sarah Hall is to step into a landscape that is feral and alive....The seven stories in Sudden Traveler merit savoring slowly: several of them reward rereading. Hall’s prose is briny and sensual....Her lyricism....reveals the influence of James Salter, but it’s a voice, fierce and unapologetic, uniquely her own." Financial Times

She has been a member of the Arts Council Northwest region, responsible for investment in the arts. Burntcoat is a novel that feels more triggered by the pandemic than caused by it: visceral and intuitive, the prose is also non-stop glorious – a hymn to the physical and fragile nature of existence.' Her first collection of short stories, titled The Beautiful Indifference, was published by Faber & Faber in November 2011. The Beautiful Indifference won the Portico Prize for Fiction 2012 and the Edge Hill short story prize, and it was also short-listed for the Frank O'Connor Prize. The story Butcher’s Perfume was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. Her work is published throughout the world and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. She has performed at numerous literary festivals in the UK and around the world and has been a participant of British Council conferences and seminars abroad, most recently discussing new British Nature Writing in Germany with Robert MacFarlane. About the book: “A sharp and stunning novel of art and ambition, mortality and connection, Burntcoat is a major work from "one of our most influential short story writers" (Guardian). It is an intimate and vital examination of how and why we create--make art, form relationships, build a life--and an urgent exploration of an unprecedented crisis, the repercussions of which are still years in the learning.”She tells us of her difficult childhood, when her mother had a stroke and was left permanently brain damaged; of her father’s decision to abandon his wife and child soon after; and of her blossoming Sarah was interviewed on BBC R4 Front Row about her 2020 BBC National Short Story Prize shortlisting: www.bbc.co.uk When, in 2020, with the onset of Covid-19, the world started shutting down and whole populations were being shut inside, literature was – at least for some of us – a way of escaping the terrors of the present or, perhaps, trying to make sense of them. Gothic, horror and post-apocalyptic fiction seemed particularly adept at reflecting the all-pervasive end-of-times atmosphere.

Hall has crafted a harrowing and memorable vision of decay, collapse and recovery…BURNTCOAT is powerful…Read it tomorrow or a decade from now — either way, it'll convey a palpable sense of what it feels like to be alive in 2021, another grueling year shaped by an epochal crisis.”— Minneapolis Star Tribune It was an incredible experience – a good disturbance in the heart. I’m haunted, but not traumatically, and a few years later wrote a short story about it all called Sudden Traveller. It is the only story I cannot read out in public. Burntcoat”, porém, poderia facilmente ter o subtítulo de “Sexo em Tempos de Pandemia”. Pouco antes do confinamento, Edith conhece Halit e decidem enfrentar esse isolamento juntos. Muito juntos. Juntíssimos. Têm pouco com que se entreter, é verdade, têm de passar o tempo de alguma forma, mas quando ficam doentes, sendo um vírus com sintomas gravíssimos, com manifestações físicas como pústulas e altamente mortífero, acho que a pornochachada se torna ridícula e de mau gosto. the label of Gothic stripped off like cheap varnish. Karoline once said to me the term is used for women whose work the establishment enjoys but doesn’t respect. Men are the existentialists. At one point in the novel, Edith is discussing Naomi’s work with her agent Karolina. Critics have reassessed her mother’s writing, she tells us,The Irish Times books of the year: Anne Enright's favourite titles of 2021: www.irishtimes.com/culture/books Overall , it’s a disturbing book in many ways and leaves me feeling very unsettled which is probably the intention. I’m sure other readers will love this book but it’s one I only like parts of. I have a lot of artists in the family and I studied art history. When people ask me about influences, I’d probably name artists and paintings and music over literature. It’s also great to be able to write about art – I like that challenge of moving things from one discipline to another. The result is Burntcoat, a dazzling, terrifying and utterly gripping story of a woman artist who finds herself living through the disconnections and a paranoia of a pandemic. At its heart, she tells me, is a question that she’s pondered throughout her work: how do we live with our own mortality? How do we prepare for what is unimaginable? ‘We are in a relationship with death,’ she says. ‘Whether or not actively or wholesomely, we are in a relationship. And death isn’t a person, death is a state, whatever you believe.’ Her debut novel, Haweswater, is a rural tragedy about the disintegration of a community of Cumbrian hill-farmers due to the building of Haweswater Reservoir. It won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book).

You were the last one here, before I closed the door of Burntcoat. Before we all closed our doors . . . The images Edith describes are familiar, even though the virus featured in the novel is actually much deadlier than the “novel coronavirus”, leading to one million deaths in the United Kingdom alone:

Sarah's story Goodnight Nobody (from Madame Zero) is one of the winners of the 2019 O. Henry Prize for short fiction: www.lithub.com/announcing-the-100th-annual-o-henry-prize