About
Stubborn Archivist Synopsis
Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2019
When your mother considers another country home, it's hard to know where you belong. When the people you live among can't pronounce your name, it's hard to know exactly who you are. And when your body no longer feels like your own, it's hard to understand your place in the world.
This is a novel of growing up between cultures, of finding your space within them and of learning to live in a traumatized body. Our stubborn archivist tells her story through history, through family conversations, through the eyes of her mother, her grandmother and her aunt and slowly she begins to emerge into the world, defining her own sense of identity.
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Press Reviews
Yara Rodrigues Fowler Press Reviews
Rodrigues Fowler's debut novel is a timely exploration of what it means to understand past and present and the delicate balance of embracing two cultures simultaneously...Original and thought-provoking, this is a book that's well worth your time - Stylist
Yara Rodrigues Fowler has written something extraordinary, playing with structure to create an insightful, lyrical and visceral novel - Emerald Street
Every page oozes with caustic wit, despair and self-awareness, creating a lyrical debut that pushes the novel form like no other in recent years. A talent to watch -- Nikesh Shukla My goodness. Yara Rodrigues-Fowler has conjured a work of rare power, startlingly original form, and devastating beauty. This novel is a triumph -- Musa Okwonga Stubborn Archivist is an intimate and wonderfully resourceful exploration of origins. In its quest to uncover what a person is made of it digs deeply into the living body, as well as tracing back through its tangled roots. Visceral and elegant, circumspect and vivid, Yara Rodrigues Fowler has a distinctly unhampered way of telling a story; I liked Stubborn Archivist very very much. -- Claire-Louise Bennett I read Stubborn Archivist in a ravenous gulp. It's stunning: so articulate about what it means to live between two languages and countries, tenderly unravelling the knots of unbelonging. -- Olivia Laing -
Author
About Yara Rodrigues Fowler
Yara Rodrigues Fowler grew up in a Brazilian-English household in London, where she still lives. She has a BA in English from Oxford and an MA in Comparative Literature at UCL. Yara is a trustee of Latin American Women's Aid, the only refuge run for and by Latin American women in the UK and has also given workshops on gender and power to teenage girls with feminist organisation Fearless Futures. Yara's writing has been published in Litro, and the UCL Publishers' Prize, and she received a Special Mention in the 2015 Galley Beggar Press Short Story Competition.
Photo Credit: Atri Banerjee
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