Lara Pawson was born in London in 1968 and studied politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Between 1996 and 2007, she worked as a journalist, mainly for the BBC World Service. She lived in Angola, Ivory Coast, Mali and Ghana, and travelled throughout Africa, before returning to London, where she now lives. Her first book In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre was published in 2014, and her experiences as a reporter covering civil wars in Angola and Ivory Coast informed her “fragmentary memoir” This Is the Place to Be (2016).
Pawson’s third book, Spent Light – another fragmentary work – is a book of objects. From a toaster that recalls a story of horrifying violence heard on a bus ride in Andalucía to a brass door handle that retains the spirit of the east London ironmonger who made it, everything that meets the narrator’s eye connects to a personal memory or historical event, in a chain of shocking, funny, revelatory associations. “It is impossible to predict,” the Goldsmiths Prize judge Sara Baume wrote, “at the beginning of almost every paragraph of Spent Light, where it will have taken the reader by the end.”
Tom Gatti: The Goldsmiths Prize was set up to reward fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”. What can an “innovative” approach offer the reader (and writer) that a more conventional novel might not?
Lara Pawson: When I look at art, or listen to music, or read literature, I want to be disrupted and discombobulated. I want a shift to take place in my thinking. I want a part of my imagination to be shattered so that my way of looking at the world is altered. The innovative theatre I watch, the improvised music I listen to, the novels that I have read that break the mould – this is what they do for me.
In Spent Light the narrator considers a series of domestic objects including a toaster, a kitchen timer, floor tiles, a toilet bowl, a squirrel’s tale in a jar. Was there a real object that gave you the initial idea for the book?
I was at the radical London bookshop, Housmans, listening to a writers’ conversation. One of the panellists was talking about fiction and auto-fiction and the way in which critics attack (some) women writers. She referred to something Sheila Heti had said: “People who look at themselves in order to better look at the world – that is not narcissism. It is, and has always been, what people who make art do, and must do. You cannot do it blind. You cannot do it by looking at a toaster.” It struck me as a provocation. Perhaps you can do it by looking at a toaster, I thought. I became obsessed with the challenge to look at objects (regardless of whether I owned them or not) and make art.
You describe Spent Light as a “hybrid work” containing fiction, memoir and history. How did you negotiate the relationship between the three as you were writing?
There was no negotiation. My only rule was to follow, with full attention and loyalty, the contents of my mind as I gazed (sometimes for hours, sometimes weeks on end) at a single object. What I imagined, what I dreamt, what I remembered, what I’d seen and what I’d read (or thought I’d read) had to be written down. I like to write with rules. The restriction pushes my mind into strange and unexpected places, creating something new, something novel. It is liberating.
For me, the novel form is the one space in my life where I can explore absolute freedom. There are no limits. And I am certain that most novels are a mash-up of the author’s imagination, their lived life, the books they have read, the TV, films, and videos they have watched, the news they have consumed, and the places to which they have travelled, et cetera. It frustrates me that the market insists on categories. I am grateful to WG Sebald for showing so explicitly that these categories are barriers to good writing. They are barriers I had to leap over or kick out the way every morning I turned up to the screen to write Spent Light.
Can you tell me a bit about your experiences as a reporter – particularly on wars and zones of conflict – and how they informed the writing of this book?
If you grow up with the immense, even absurd privileges that I did, coming from a middle-class, white British family living in one of the richest parts of a country that is itself one of the richest in the world, of course you are going to experience shock when you leave this comfort, security and peace. Living and working in countries with civil wars taught me a great deal about human nature, including my own cowardice, but it also hammered home the scale of hypocrisy of the British, the US, French and Portuguese governments in particular. This informs my everyday life, just as much as my writing. In fact, my experiences as a reporter were key markers for my previous book, a fragmentary memoir, This Is the Place to Be.
With Spent Life, the violence seeped in. I didn’t want it there, but it kept appearing. Of course! This is the world we live in. From the homeless people we pass on the streets to the genocidal onslaught streaming on to our phones every single day, you don’t need to have been a foreign correspondent to respond to this. You simply need to look into the abyss with your eyes, ears and heart wide open.
In Spent Light objects such as a rotting apple are examined with the care and attention that one might pay a great work of art. Do you get pleasure from such intense looking and noticing?
Oh yes, great pleasure. But you raise an interesting point because of course there are so many great works of art that are, themselves, an examination of a single object or a group of objects. Vincent Van Gogh painted a bowl of potatoes, René Magritte painted a comb, Mona Hatoum has made many sculptures from colanders – the list goes on. At one point, I considered giving my book the title “Still Life”.
I was fascinated by the passages on the architect Louis Kahn, whose observation that we are all made of spent light gives the book its title. What was it about Khan’s ideas that spoke to you?
I can’t remember how I came across his work or when, but I remember a feeling deep inside me, I might even define it as spiritual, when I encountered his work. Were he still alive, I would bow down low.
Tell me about a piece of art, literature or music that was important to you when writing this book.
Listening to Thelonious Monk and also the Necks, watching Forced Entertainment at the theatre, and Tarkovsky’s Mirror on my laptop, gazing at the paintings of Frank Auerbach and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, reading M John Harrison’s blog, certain books by Achille Mbembe and Theodor Adorno, as well as Peter Schwenger’s phenomenal text The Tears of Things – all of these, among others, were very important to me.
Five of the six books on the Goldsmiths Prize shortlist are published by an independent press. This is your second book with CB Editions – can you tell me a bit about the experience of working with a small publisher and what it has offered you as a writer?
How long have you got? Charles Boyle has offered me everything and more. I must tell you that he encouraged me to try to sell Spent Light to bigger publishers with more money. After two dozen had said No, I went back to CB editions with my tail between my legs. Yes, he said, yes, of course. We had lunch and celebrated. He has shown me what it is to be a writer. He offers radical generosity. And look at the writers I am published alongside: Diane Williams! Ágota Kristóf! What more could a writer ask for?
Why do we need the Goldsmiths Prize?
To show readers and writers that there is real freedom to be had. In a world that is controlling most of us, killing some of us, destroying ancient land and cultures, we must keep pushing for this freedom.
What past British or Irish novel deserves a retrospective Goldsmiths Prize? Why?
If you insist on restricting me to a British or Irish novel, without a doubt I would say Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. I bought the Trilogy in a bookshop when I was in my early twenties and, even then, regretted that I had not come to it earlier in my short life. Reading it, I realised that there was much more to the idea of the novel than I had been led to believe. If there were an International Goldsmiths Prize, however, I would want to see Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, Jean Toomer’s Cane, Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard among the winners.
“Spent Light” is published by CB Editions. The winner of the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize will be announced on 6 November
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