Description
About Brandon Taylor
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
About The Late Americans
**A Book of 2023 in the Guardian, Irish Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire and i-D**
In a university town in the American Midwest a circle of lovers and friends navigate tangled webs of connection as they try to work out what they want, and who they areAs they test their own desires in a series of relationships they are confronted by volatile figures in town, from unruly, vulnerable young poets to a local landlord harbouring a lifetime of resentment. Seamus, Fyodor, Ivan, Noah and Fatima ask themselves and each other: what is the right thing to stake a life on? Work, love, money, dance, poetry? Is love possible without harm? And what does true connection look like in an age of precarity?
‘Tender and unflinching… A wonderful book’ Colin Barrett, author of Homesickness
‘Taylor is a sharp chronicler of the body’ Raven Leilani, author of Luster
‘A glimmering study of young humans in brutal times’ Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar
About Vanessa Kisuule
Vanessa Kisuule is a writer and performer based in Bristol. She has won over ten slam titles including The Roundhouse Slam 2014, Hammer and Tongue National Slam 2014 and the Nuoryican Poetry Slam. She has been featured on BBC iPlayer, Radio 1, and Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, Blue Peter, Don’t Flop and TEDx in Vienna. She has appeared at an array of literary and music festivals and was Glastonbury Festival’s Resident Poet in 2019. She has been invited to perform all over the world from Belgium to Brazil to Bangladesh.
Her poem on the historic toppling of Edward Colston’s statue ‘Hollow’ gained over 600,000 views on Twitter in three days. She has two poetry collections published by Burning Eye Books and her work was Highly Commended in the Forward Poetry Prize Anthology 2019. She has written for publications including The Guardian, NME and Lonely Planet and has publication credits in pending anthologies with Canongate, Orion and Penguin Random House. She has worked extensively in theatre with Bristol Old Vic, Kneehigh Theatre and Pentabus and her Arts Council supported show ‘SEXY’ toured nationally in 2017. She was the Bristol City Poet for 2018 – 2020 and will be co-tutor for Southbank Centre’s first ever Poetry Collective alongside Will Harris. She is currently working on an essay collection and her debut novel.
