Fiona Mozley

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

Fiona Mozley
Born1988 (age 32–33)
Hackney, London, England
Genrenovel
Notable worksElmet
Website
www.fionamozley.com

Life

Fiona Mozley was born in 1988 in the London Borough of Hackney,[3] but lives 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, and working 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 has particularly enjoyed, she mentioned some by Cormac McCarthy and Ursula Le Guin, and by Philip Pullman, whom she had loved as a child.[1] She stated in October 2017 that she was working on a second novel.[7] This novel, Hot Stew, was to be published in early 2021.[8] Mozley's novel Elmet appeared in the 2018 Irish Leaving Certificate English examination.

Work

The name "Elmet" is taken from a Celtic kingdom that once covered 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."[9][10][11][12]

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."[13] 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."[13] "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."[13]

References
  1. 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. The National. Arts and Culture, 5 November 2017 Retrieved 24 May 2018.
  8. Cowdrey, Katherine (9 June 2020). "JMP reveals Mozley's second novel Hot Stew". The Bookseller. Retrieved 28 January 2021.
  9. Mozley, F. (2017). Elmet. Algonquin Books. ISBN 978-1-61620-844-8. Retrieved 17 January 2018.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  10. 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.
  11. "'Elmet' Backs a Brawny Man Into a Dangerous Corner". The New York Times. 27 November 2017. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 17 January 2018.
  12. "Debut Author Channeled Her 'Darker Bits' Into A Man Booker Shortlist Novel". NPR.org. Retrieved 17 January 2018.
  13. J. Robert Lennon: "Scary Dad", London Review of Books, 10 May 2018, pp. 35–37.
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