Fiona Mozley
Born1988 (age 34–35)
Hackney, London, England
Genrenovel
Notable worksElmet
Website
www.fionamozley.com

Fiona Mozley (born 1988)[1] is an English novelist and medievalist. Her debut novel, Elmet, was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker prize.[2]

Life and literature

Fiona Mozley was born in 1988 in the London Borough of Hackney,[3] and now lives in Edinburgh. She used to live in York, where she grew up and attended Fulford School.[4] In the meantime she spent periods in London, Cambridge and Buenos Aires before moving back to York in 2013. Besides writing fiction, she is engaged on a PhD thesis at the University of York[1] on the concept of decay in the later Middle Ages. She also works part-time in a bookshop.[5]

Mozley sees as York's most significant literature its Mystery Plays. These along with local drama groups she views "as having influenced my own writing more significantly than any books I have read."[6] When asked at an earlier interview about writers and works she particularly enjoyed, she mentioned some by Cormac McCarthy and Ursula Le Guin, and by Philip Pullman, whom she had loved as a child.[1] Mozley's novel Elmet appeared in the 2018 Irish Leaving Certificate English examination.

Mozley's second novel titled Hot Stew was published in 2021.[7] Writing for The Guardian, Alex Preston praised the work and said it confirmed the author was "a writer of extraordinary empathic gifts".[7]

Work

The name "Elmet" is taken from a Celtic kingdom that once covered West Yorkshire. In the novel, Mozley "wanted to capture the ambiguity of local historical recollections; to say something about their double-edged thrall; to examine the desire to live in the past and the need to extricate oneself from it."[8][9][10][11]

The novel Elmet is concerned strongly with the idea of home, "the building of a house, the preparation of food; stolen glimpses of a woman's wardrobe."[12] This moves stealthily onto the fact that the 14-year-old narrator, Daniel, is not just domesticated, but must come to terms with being gay, or even transgender, while his older sister Cathy is a tomboy "raised in isolation by a man poorly suited to the job, and taught skills typically taken up by boys."[12] "Daddy" is kind to his two children, but otherwise known to be violent. The father's concern is for the land: "the wilderness tamed by man's benevolent but dictatorial hand... [that] provides fertile ground for the evil that men do."[12]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Vogue interview, 16 October 2017 Retrieved 24 May 2018.
  2. ↑ "Fiona Mozley is a rising star of British fiction". The Economist. Retrieved 4 August 2017.
  3. ↑ Publisher's site Retrieved 24 May 2018.
  4. ↑ Williers, Daniel (18 October 2017). "York author narrowly misses out on Man Booker Prize". The York Press. Retrieved 25 April 2020.
  5. ↑ "How author Fiona Mozley went from working part-time in a bookshop to shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize". The National. Retrieved 17 January 2018.
  6. ↑ Statement in The Guardian, 27 January 2018 Retrieved 24 May 2018.
  7. 1 2 Preston, Alex (14 March 2021). "Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley review – a rich, ribald tale of old Soho under siege". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712. Retrieved 8 May 2023.
  8. ↑ Mozley, F. (2017). Elmet. Algonquin Books. ISBN 978-1-61620-844-8. Retrieved 17 January 2018.
  9. ↑ Mozley, Fiona (30 September 2017). "Fiona Mozley: I'm on the Man Booker shortlist and top of my fantasy football league". The Guardian. Retrieved 17 January 2018.
  10. ↑ "'Elmet' Backs a Brawny Man Into a Dangerous Corner". The New York Times. 27 November 2017. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 17 January 2018.
  11. ↑ "Debut Author Channeled Her 'Darker Bits' Into A Man Booker Shortlist Novel". NPR.org. Retrieved 17 January 2018.
  12. 1 2 3 J. Robert Lennon: "Scary Dad", London Review of Books, 10 May 2018, pp. 35–37.
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