Diego Garcia, which has won the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize, is a collaboration between two writers. Natasha Soobramanien, British-Mauritian, and Luke Williams, Scottish, met while studying creative writing at the University of East Anglia; their collaboration on Diego Garcia began in 2011 and took ten years to complete. Drawing on Soobramanien and Williams’s time in Edinburgh (they now live in Brussels and Cove, west Scotland, respectively), the novel begins as a portrait of two writers whose haphazard routine is interrupted when they meet Diego, a poet named after Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago of the Indian Ocean.
The Chagossian people – including, in the novel, Diego’s mother – were expelled from their homeland by Britain between 1968 and 1973 so that the island could be leased to the US government for the construction of a military base. (On 3 November 2022, six months after the publication of Diego Garcia and a few days after my conversation with Soobramanien and Williams, the British government reversed its previous position and announced that it will negotiate with Mauritius over the return of the Chagos Islands.) As the two narrators get more interested in the facts of the Chagos case and its tragic legacy, the novel’s form develops: vivid and witty Edinburgh scenes are interspersed with their texts: research, works of fiction, email exchanges. Diego Garcia is a ceaselessly inventive novel with an urgent question at its heart: how do you tell a story that is not yours to tell?
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