Katharine Kilalea

OK, herra Field havainnoi nautinnollisesti verkkaisesti elämää ja esineitä konserttipianistin silmin. Kertoja tavoittaa sekä pidäteltyä että ei-ilmeistä, katkosten lomasta jännittymäisillään olevia merkityksiä ja unenomaisena purkautuvaa tunnelmaa.

Shortlisted for the London Magazine and Collyer Bristow Debut Fiction Prize, 2019Mr Field, a concert pianist travelling back from a performance in London, suffers a fractured wrist in a train crash. On a whim, he uses his compensation money to buy a house he has seen in a newspaper - a replica of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye -- on the coast outside Cape Town. But when Mr Field moves there with his wife, Mim, he finds that the house has a disturbing and unexpected effect. Dwelling in the gaps within conversations, and the distances between people, OK, Mr Field is a powerful story of obsession, disintegration and loneliness.

Mr Field, a concert pianist travelling back from a performance in London, fractures his left wrist in a train crash. On a whim, he uses his compensation cheque to buy a house he has seen only in a newspaper, a replica of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye built on a stretch of coast outside Cape Town. When he moves there with his wife Mim, the house - which Le Corbusier designed as 'a machine for living' - has a disturbing effect. Mim disappears without apology or explanation and Mr Field can barely summon the strength to search for her. OK, Mr Field is funny and beguiling and like nothing you've ever read. It dwells in the silences between words, in the gaps in conversations, and in the distances between people. It confidently guides us into new fictional territory.

"One Eye'd Leigh" is a book of portraits, experiments and objects made of words. They find their locations between Cape Town and London, between the dawn of the new millennium and the present day. Guided by a biographical thread, in her first collection Kate Kilalea borrows the techniques of a craftsman to transform material into new shapes: an artist's concentrated gaze at the very particular subject in her portrait poems; an embroiderer's delicate craft of stitching to create a paced poetry, meticulous in detail. Her language is familiar, her forms transparent. She leads readers through a landscape in which the lucid angles of a chair might express love more precisely than the lines of a sonnet. It is the ways in which these poems turn what is familiar into something strange and new, what is stable fluid, and how out of light darkness is seen to shine, that make these poems powerful, haunting and original.