Shola von Reinhold is a Scottish writer. Her debut novel, LOTE (2020), was published by Jacaranda Books during the publisher's #Twentyin2020 campaign, an initiative to "publish 20 titles by 20 Black British writers in one year".[1] LOTE won the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Memorial Prize. Von Reinhold was briefly a princess, having married into a minor branch of the Grimaldi family at the age of 17. She divorced their husband after discovering anarcho-communism.[2]

LOTE

LOTE 's protagonist Mathilda Adamarola sets out to recover "forgotten artistic and literary figures of the past", whom they call "Transfixions”.[3][4]

Mathilda's "Transfixions" include real and fictional figures, including "1920s aesthete and socialite Stephen Tennant and the Bright Young Things", and Roberte Horth, an early 20th century writer from French Guiana who lived in Paris.[4] In the National Portrait Gallery archive, Mathilda encounters Hermia Druitt, a Black Scottish poet.[5] Mathilda's approach to understanding Druitt's life and work relates to processes of "literary recovery" practiced by "feminist scholars in the 1970s and 1980s who sought to correct the male biases of the British literary canon."[3]

In the novel, decadence, glamour or luxury are forms of "resistance [...] an opposition to the Whiteness that has always told Black people that they are too ornamented",[4][6][7] with the protagonists identifying how "this prejudice has its roots in colonialist contempt for African culture".[8]

Awards and honours

Selected bibliography

  • LOTE, 2020

References

  1. ↑ "#TwentyIn2020: Black Writers, British Voices". Jacaranda Books. Retrieved 17 December 2021.
  2. ↑ "Trans Aesthetics: McKenzie Wark & Shola von Reinhold in conversation with Susan Stryker | Mills Performing Arts". performingarts.mills.edu. Retrieved 10 May 2022.
  3. 1 2 "LOTE – Shola von Reinhold". Retrieved 17 December 2021.
  4. 1 2 3 Thomas, Skye Arundhati (17 June 2020). "Glamour and Resistance in Shola von Reinhold's 'Lote'". Frieze. Retrieved 17 December 2021.
  5. ↑ "Shola von Reinhold's 'LOTE'". The White Review. Retrieved 17 December 2021.
  6. ↑ "Interview: Shola von Reinhold". The Modernist Review. 3 July 2020. Retrieved 17 December 2021.
  7. ↑ Dytor, Frankie. "Interview with Shola von Reinhold: 'It felt like Hermia Fabulated herself out of the archive'". Lucy Writers Platform. Retrieved 17 December 2021.
  8. ↑ "LOTE by Shola von Reinhold review – a celebration of eccentricity". the Guardian. 10 June 2020. Retrieved 17 December 2021.
  9. ↑ "LOTE by Shola von Reinhold wins the Republic of Consciousness Prize!". Jacaranda Books. Retrieved 17 December 2021.
  10. ↑ "Von Reinhold and Ní Ghríofa win £10k James Tait Black prizes | The Bookseller". www.thebookseller.com. Retrieved 17 December 2021.
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