She receives £30,000, and joins a list of former winners that includes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Maggie O’Farrell and Kamila Shamsie. Piranesi considers himself very free, but he’s cut off from the rest of humanity.”Ĭlarke was named winner of the prize at a ceremony in London on Wednesday evening. “I was aware that I was a person cut off from the world, bound in one place by illness. “I thought, it doesn’t have hundreds of characters and it won’t require a huge amount of research because I don’t know what research I could do for it,” she said last year, comparing her own situation to that of her hero. Writing became more difficult, and she put aside the planned sequel, returning to a previous work in progress, which would become Piranesi. It’s very hard to make it into a shape,” she told the Guardian last year. It’s hard to remember an illness because it’s just a lot of nothing. And then in the spring of 2005 I collapsed, and that was the beginning of it. “I was doing a lot of travelling and promoting and getting on and off aeroplanes – the sort of thing I’d never done before. But as Clarke travelled to promote it, she became ill with what would eventually be diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome. It went on to sell 4m copies around the world, winning her prizes from the World Fantasy award to the British Book award for newcomer of the year. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The GuardianĬlarke published Jonathan Strange, her story of magicians in 19th-century England, in 2004, when she was 44. ‘Piranesi pretty much sums up what the Women’s fiction prize is all about’ … Susanna Clarke. has created a world beyond our wildest imagination that also tells us something profound about what it is to be human.” So it was so hard to compare these books, because they were all so different and individually brilliant, but Piranesi really made a lasting impression on us.”Įvaristo agreed: “We wanted to find a book that we’d press into readers’ hands, which would have a lasting impact. It’s certainly like nothing I’ve ever read before, and we all kept returning to this book. We’ve had a year like no other, and we feel that we’ve got a winner like no other. “But we went for something that was totally original. “It was difficult because this year’s shortlist was so varied,” said Mee. Judge Sarah-Jane Mee, the news broadcaster, said it had been “really tough” to choose a winner from the shortlist of six novels, which ranged from Brit Bennett’s bestseller The Vanishing Half, about identical twin sisters, one of whom “passes” for white, to Cherie Jones’s debut of murder and violence on Barbados, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House. She thanked her editor, Alexandra Pringle, and her agent, Jonny Geller, both of whom “immediately had faith in what I thought was a very odd book indeed”, and “most of all” her husband, the novelist and critic Colin Greenland, “without whose support the book simply would not have been written”. And my hope is that my standing here tonight will encourage other women who are incapacitated by long illness.” So this feels doubly extraordinary I’m doubly honoured to be here. It is the book that I never thought I would get to write – I never thought I’d be well enough. She told the audience: “As some of you will know, Piranesi was nurtured, written and publicised during a long illness. As Piranesi records the wonders of the house in his journal – the birds and the clouds in its upper realms the tides that move through it – he has regular meetings with a mysterious Other, the only person he believes to be alive, until he finds signs of another visitor.Ĭlarke was visibly emotional as she accepted the £30,000 award, describing it as an “immense, incredible honour”.
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