In the previous issue of Alluvium, Christine Lehnen wrote about the possibilities and limitations of post-national literature in Europe in the 21st century. As part of an ongoing research project, she is conducting expert interviews with practitioners to explore their stance on nationality and how it shapes (or fails to shape) their writing.
View More Post-National Authors, Post-National Literature? An Interview with David Szalay
In the novel All That Man Is (2016), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, nine protagonists travel the European continent, from Lille over Budapest to Copenhagen and beyond. The author, David Szalay, is quite a traveller himself: a Canadian citizen raised in London who is now based in Budapest and published in the United Kingdom. In 2013, he was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. But can such a book, or indeed such an author, be fully understood if considered only as a ‘British’?
View More European Literature—made in the UK?