No, but I remember posting a draft of a novel to Bloomsbury and some other publishers when I was eleven thinking, ‘What a shock they’re going to be in for when they discover I’m eleven!’ What a grim and mercenary approach to writing to have as a child. It also features hotels scams, champagne theft, puritanical art saboteurs and a modernist angel cult whose members believe the mythological lotus-eaters were a proto-luxury-communist society based in West Africa.Ĭan you remember when you realised you wanted to write? It is partly about the blanching of pre-Windrush Black artists and writers in Britain and Europe, and is partly about a contemporary pursuit of beauty, excess and the politics therein from a queer Black perspective. Thank you! LOTE charts its narrator Mathilda’s rediscovery of the Afro-Scottish interwar modernist poet, Hermia Druitt. We caught up with them to chat about their journey in writing so far.Ĭongratulatons on the publication of your debut novel, LOTE. Shola Von Reinhold’s first novel, LOTE, promises to be packed full of provocative, exciting writing and ideas. ‘I began to wonder who she was, if any of her work survives, and what it was like for a Black woman studying at a prestigious institute in London at that time.’ Time now, for another debutante, another fresh, new voice in Scottish fiction.
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