East End Review

Category: BOOKS

  • Will Volley, Hackney graphic novelist and creator of The Opportunity – interview

    Will Volley, Hackney graphic novelist and creator of The Opportunity – interview

    A panel from The Opportunity, Will Volley's graphic novel.
    A panel from The Opportunity, Will Volley’s graphic novel.

    Multi-level marketing, sometimes known as pyramid selling, may not strike most people as a gripping subject for a debut comic noir. But then Will Volley is not most people. After publishing graphic novel versions of Romeo and Juliet and An Inspector Calls, the 35 year-old took a year off work, moved back home and wrote his own comic.

    The Opportunity is about Colin, a successful door-to-door salesman on the verge of getting his own sales office. One day everything changes and Colin’s sales team is given a new all-or-nothing target, and only five days to achieve it in.

    Volley explains why door-to-door sales made such a good subject, the Stoke Newington schoolteacher who inspired him and the fallen footballer he’s covering in his next novel.

    How much of this story was drawn from your own experience?

    My experience in a multi-level marketing company was limited to about two or three weeks. I enjoyed it – being a navel-gazing art student and coming into that climate was great because it was different, and the people there were enthusiastic. But there were things about this company that didn’t make sense: all the staff lived together in the same flat and it felt a bit like a cult. Through research I found support groups online for people who’d worked in this company, and then I devised a plot from interviewing ex-managers.

    Did you ever worry about how you were going to make a gripping thriller about multi-level marketing?

    No! When I was working there I thought: this is the perfect premise for a story. But it took me a while to come up with a plot I was satisfied with.

    How’s the political landscape and the job market changed since you worked for this company?

    It’s the same. A funny thing happened when I had literally just finished the book. I got a knock on the door, got up from my desk and went downstairs, and there was this young salesman. His pitch was word for word the same one I used ten years ago. Talk about weird.

    The-Opportunity-cover-image-620

    So I sort of cut him short and said, look, you need to be careful. He looked startled. I felt bad about it because he looked disappointed. Young people want to be optimistic and they offer incredible loyalty. That’s what this company provides: it gives you a thick blanket of security and the managers big you up. It’s hard to say how common these types of companies are now, but at the book launch someone came up to me and said they had spent a day with these guys in Tottenham.

    You mentioned in another interview that one of your teachers brought Daredevil comics into school.

    That was a real turning point. I went to William Patten Primary School and I had a teacher who was an ex-punk. He introduced me to weird things you wouldn’t expect kids to read and seeing that artwork by that specific artist changed everything for me. I fell in love with it and my own drawing just kind of grew from there.

    What are you working on next?

    A story about an ex-footballer who turns to a life of crime. I read a statistic that 40 per cent of ex-footballers go bankrupt within five years of their career ending. Football’s all they know and if they’re trying to maintain their lifestyle lots of them end up gambling, getting into debt and some even go to prison. It’s going to be much more personal: another falling from grace story, but this time a redemption tale.

    The Opportunity is published by Myriad Press. ISBN: 9781908434791.
    RRP: £12.99. Volley will be signing copies at the East London Comic Arts Festival (ELCAF) on 11 June.

  • In a Land of Paper Gods author on ‘naughty children who disappeared from history’

    In a Land of Paper Gods author on ‘naughty children who disappeared from history’

    Rebecca Mackenzie, author of In a Land of Paper Gods
    Rebecca Mackenzie, author of In a Land of Paper Gods

    Rebecca Mackenzie grew up in the jungles of Thailand, where her parents worked as Christian missionaries, but at 12 she and her family moved back to a Scottish fishing village.

    Now living in Hackney, MacKenzie has written her debut novel, In a Land of Paper Gods, which steers away from her early experiences to tell the story of a schoolgirl in a boarding school in China at the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War.

    Rebecca, how long have you lived in Hackney?

    I moved to London at 17 when I went to university and I’ve been here ever since. I moved to Dalston over ten years ago. Friends used to be hugely relieved when I’d meet them from the bus stop and walk them back again. Now I live at the top of a vicarage in Stoke Newington. I love it, even though the first thing I see outside my front door is a graveyard.

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    The thing that seems to have struck a lot of reviewers is that it’s quite personal book – something that had parallels with what you experienced growing up.

    What drew me to the lives of missionary kids was my personal experience. I grew up in what was partly an evangelical environment, but I was also surrounded by Thai animism, spirit worship, and the idea that there were spirits and creatures everywhere. But I chose to set the book in a different part of Asia, at a different period in history because I needed that distance to kickstart my imagination.

    While there are definitely biographical themes there’s also a truth that comes from my dreamworld that’s not like the truth of your day-to-day reality.

    I believe in synchronicity as well and there were synchronous moments in the writing for the book. For example I went to interview an English woman who’d lived in China during the Sino-Japanese war, and like me she was the daughter of missionaries. We were having this nice cup of tea together and I felt something. I couldn’t stop looking at her. It turned out that she’d returned from China to Edinburgh and she’d moved into the same street in Edinburgh I’d lived on, 50 years before me, and her grandparents came from the same tiny village in the north of Scotland my grandparents came from.

    I thought that the voice of the lead character, Etta, was very strong. How did you create her?

    I saw these formal school photographs at SOAS from a missionary school. Some children, if they weren’t sitting still, became a kind of blur. I became interested in these naughty children, who somehow disappeared from history as a result of fidgeting.

    What things as a writer do you find particularly helpful about living in London?

    Being near other writers and other creative people is a wonderful resource, but with that comes distraction.

    How do you make time for writing, solitude and focus?

    I love sitting in Rare Books and Music in the British Library. The concentration in there spurs me on to keep working.

    In a Land of Paper Gods
    is published by Tinder Press.
    RRP: £16.99 ISBN: 9781472224194

  • On Message – writer and ex-bicycle courier pens memoir on wheels

    On Message – writer and ex-bicycle courier pens memoir on wheels

    Bicycle courier turned journalist and author, Julian Sayarer
    Bicycle courier turned journalist and author, Julian Sayarer

    As a bicycle courier, Julian Sayarer spent three years being a “tangible cog” in a world of multi-million pound contracts, greasing the wheels of the global economy.

    When Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, he delivered the receivership notices to the bank in Canary Wharf, becoming a bit-part player in a major historical event.

    “It shows the quite humanised absurdity of the world economy that the couriers get paid £7.50 to deliver three sets of notices on a £50 billion bail out,” he recalls wryly.

    In his book Messengers, Sayarer, now a journalist and author living in Dalston, writes about being a cycle courier, transporting information from bank to law firm, learning London off by heart, and becoming intimately acquainted with kerbs, potholes and alleyways.

    Sayarer first started couriering after finishing university and returning from a year living in Istanbul.

    “You’re pedalling around London, sometimes coughing your guts up because of the air quality, or you’re sick but don’t get sick pay and so have to go to work anyway. But I was in my early 20s and on balance it was enjoyable, diving between gaps in traffic and hammering it hard across the city for your next delivery.”

    In 2009, Sayarer broke a world record for cycling around the world, recounted in his first book Life Cycles. The previous record holder, Mark Beaumont, had the backing of corporate firms and sponsorship deals. So when Sayarer broke the record he not only stuck it to his arch-rival, but to the man too.

    But returning to London, the victory began to seem hollow. A world-record on your CV doesn’t always help your job prospects, and soon Sayarer slipped back into cycle couriering.

    Messengers is set around 2010-11, after Sayarer had returned from travelling, and the initial thrill of darting around London on two wheels had made way to misgivings about the future.

    “There’s lots of notions of readjustment in it,” he says. “Cycling through Kazakhstan, you’d get people inviting you in to have tea in their yurt, and then you go back to the City, which is money motivated, fast-paced and frequently hostile – so there’s quite a lot of reflection on the nature of the modern city.”

    The word “precarious” comes up more than once in our conversation, a word that describes the profession in several ways.

    Before the dawn of email, a bicycle courier could eke out a living, but now couriers are among the ranks of the lowest earners. In return for risking their lives each day they are made to work as self-employed contractors – meaning no pension contributions, no sick leave and no holiday pay.

    But despite the physical exhaustion, the poor pay and the lack of prospects, there is also camaraderie amongst cycle couriers, a subculture and sense of community that marks it out from other professions.

    “It’s an urban community and it has its rituals. You have the alleycat racers who organise races where messengers will compete against each other, you’ve got the courier world championships held in places like Chicago, Warsaw and Lausanne where couriers from around the world would race.

    In London, couriers would hang out at the former Foundry pub, which lay on the corner the junction of Old Street and Great Eastern Street.

    “There’d always be a gathering of couriers out front drinking tinnies from the off-licence, which is probably one of the reasons why the pub couldn’t survive,” Sayarer reflects.

    As more vital information is driven online, cycle couriers will only become less needed and it might not be long before the profession disappears completely.

    Sayarer tells me that when he was a courier, colleagues and friends would be able to get by through living in a squat – something no longer viable since squatting a residential building has been criminalised.

    “It’s a genuine community that’ll look after people who maybe are a little rough around the edges but still have that right and need of a community, and I think the modern city is squeezing people out of space for that sort of thing,” he says.

    A time came for Sayarer when the thrill of careering through traffic gave way to a fear of doing it for the rest of his life. Now 30, he can look back at couriering as a chapter of his life that has come to a close.

    However, he is aware that not everyone doing the job has that luxury.

    “It’s all well and good having this social tourism and saying this is a job with a shelf life and eventually you get out because it’s hard,” he says.

    “But you need to talk about the people who don’t get out of that job, who are going to do it for the rest of their working lives and never manage to get the breaks to move on.

    “I think it’s something I would have always wanted this book to bring out.”

    Messengers: City Tales from a London Bicycle Courier is published by Arcadia Books.
    RRP: £8.99 ISBN: 9781910050767

    Julian Sayerer will be reading from Messengers on 7th April at Pages of Hackney
    pagesofhackney.co.uk

  • Skinning Out to Sea book review – Naval gazing

    Skinning Out to Sea book review – Naval gazing

    An illustration from Skinning Out to Sea
    An illustration from Skinning Out to Sea

    At 15 and a half, having bunked off most of his final year at school, Mick Hugo ‘skinned out to sea’. In other words, he gave in to the nagging urge to ditch his native Hoxton, and joined the merchant navy. It was the early 1960s and he was leaving behind the unlikely prospect of a chance career in the film industry, in favour of ‘horizons’.

    Half a century on from leaving the service, Hugo, now a builder by trade, has written 100 or so pages about his time working on the world’s oceans. His thoughts on various aspects of the seaman’s experience, which have remained roughly etched in his memory, represent a kind of challenge to conventional literature.

    He writes in a raw, rugged style, untamed by any pretentious notions of a burgeoning literary life. As a result, Skinning Out To Sea is fresh and bracing, delivered in a manner befitting a boozy pub chat. Its sentences are often long and can feel unchecked, which, though occasionally jarring, contributes to a rambling style that’s lifted by Hugo’s clear knack for poetry.

    Comprised of 20 short chapters and accompanied by a series of the author’s own evocative, if scruffy, sketches, the book covers myriad subjects. It details raucous exploits in far-flung ports, the day-to-day grind on deck, the social structure of the ships’ crews – which operate almost like allegorical micro-societies – and, of course, the wild exchange of pranks.

    Portions of the text that stand out include recollections of when a troubled crew mate, Brummie, threw himself overboard into the black waves, and of a charismatic man-about-town, Lenny, who, it turned out, was in a relationship with a rather more unkempt male steward. The former description, which is accompanied by the original logbook account, offers stark insight into what was at stake for some at sea, while the latter is handled with a confident balance of humour and sensitivity.

    Moreover, Hugo’s equating of the initial arrival of British sailors in blissful Tahiti centuries ago with taking acid for the first time is worthy of considerable praise.

    Cover-Scan-620

    While you might expect an abundance of tales of ill health and strife from a book of this sort, Skinning Out, for the most part, provides the opposite. Other than a period spent locked up in New Zealand – for reasons that remain unclear – Hugo’s personal experience comes across as largely positive and full of wonder. It was a chance to see the world, which for a working-class lad from the East End in those days was otherwise rare, and he relished it.

    He describes the pleasure of jobs that entailed weeks at sea without respite: ‘If it were a longish passage, work would settle down to a relaxing pattern of day work, watch keeping and sobriety. No TV, no radio, no newspapers, regular meal times, sufficient sleep… and predominantly tropical weather with constantly changing astronomical night skies, no family responsibilities, no bills to pay… Aye, ‘twas hard!’

    There is, however, a political undercurrent tracking the decline of the merchant fleet, touching on events like the seamen’s strike of 1966, which arrived in tandem with Hugo’s own political coming of age. This episode pretty much marked the end of his nautical career; but for a brief comeback with the highly desirable Australian merchant navy, he resigned himself to a life on land.

    At home, Hugo would “slip back into the fold” and take his place “among the huddle on the corner”. He applied some of the skills he acquired as a seafarer to decorating for his money, but he always harboured creative ambitions, painting and sculpting away in his parents’ council flat. Now, at 70, he’s produced something special: Skinning Out To Sea is a modest triumph.

    Mick Hugo will be in conversation with the writer Ken Worpole, and will also read from his book, on Thursday 10th March 2016 at 7pm.

    The event will be held at Brick Lane Bookshop, and is free (including a glass of wine) but booking is essential – click here for more information and to book a place.

    Skinning Out to Sea is published by Bowline Books. RRP: £10. ISBN: 9780993429507

  • How London’s terror attacks inspired novel No More Heroes

    Stephen Thompson
    Novelist Stephen Thompson

    Most people can remember what they were doing when they heard the news of the 7/7 bombings. I was working as a receptionist in an office in Bloomsbury, and heard a bang from several streets away of a number 30 bus exploding on Tavistock Square.

    No More Heroes, by Hackney-born author Stephen Thompson, takes us closer still to the events of 7/7. The reader returns to the day of the attacks through the character of Simon Weekes, a man who miraculously survived one of the blasts on the London Underground.

    Simon, an unambitious man who wants nothing more than a quiet life, is catapulted into the media spotlight after saving people’s lives in the aftermath of the bombing.

    But attention is exactly what Simon doesn’t want, for he is harbouring a dark secret. The book goes further back in time to Simon’s childhood in Hackney during the Eighties, where we find out about the life from which he has long since escaped, but is now threatening to catch up on him.

    Judging from accounts of survivors, the book’s fast-paced prologue is a realistic and extremely vivid portrayal of what happened that day, to the extent that at first I thought the book was autobiographical.

    But Stephen Thompson is not in the business of autobiography. The 44-year-old author, who has published four other novels, was not even in the country at the time of the bombings, though recalls them having a profound effect on him.

    “The event itself rocked me as a Londoner even though I wasn’t in London at the time,” he says. “It took me a long time to filter it and to understand what had had such a strong impact on me, and what if anything I wanted to say about it.

    “I realised what I wanted to say was that we can come back from something like that. Only seven years later we had the Olympics here, which around the time of 7/7 no one could have imagined actually happening.”

    Simon’s parents are African-Caribbean immigrants, and ethnicity is not incidental to the narrative. Freeing himself from the bombed out carriage, Simon in his shock identifies each person by their skin colour.

    For Thompson, writing through the prism of race is an “inescapable thing” for any black writer who works within established literary traditions.

    “The consciousness [of race] changes your approach and the fabric and whole aesthetic of the piece. You have to make up that mind: do I want to go down that road or do I want to write for a non-ethnic or non-colour specific audience? I chose to concentrate on race because I thought race and racial identity, and religion and religious extremism, are important components of the novel and give it another dimension.”

    Like his protagonist, Thompson grew up in Hackney during the 1980s to working class parents of African-Caribbean immigrant stock. But any similarities end there, as Thompson stresses that Simon Weekes is a “fictional composite” and that the book’s tales of squatting and of school and family life, are the result of rigorous research into the period.

    “Good fiction does have some kind of autobiographical underpinning,” he says. “But I’m keen to stress that I am a writer who uses the tools and trade of his imagination to create fiction.”

    That said, the decision to set part of No More Heroes in Hackney was, Thompson admits, a case of writing what you know.

    “Many of the bombers were from the north and I toyed with the idea setting it in the north of England,” he says, “but I thought I’m from Hackney so it just made sense to set it in this part of the world.”

    No More Heroes is published by Jacaranda Books. RRP: £7.99 ISBN: 9781909762121

  • A Traveller’s Year: 365 Days of Travel Writing in Diaries, Journals and Letters – review

    Travis Elborough
    Author and historian Travis Elborough

    In the dead of winter, the mind has a tendency to venture into warmer climes and imagine the adventures to be had there. But the holidays are over, and most of us face the daily grind through bleak grey days for weeks to come. What better way to escape than a good travel book?

    A Traveller’s Year puts at one’s fingertips a cornucopia of travel writing, in small morsels. The book is made up of snippets of travellers’ journals and diaries from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. Use of the calendar day as an organising principle means that the book is full of serendipitous incongruities of time and place.

    A 1992 account by Max Décharné of a man in an American bar asking for his Guinness to be microwaved is immediately followed by James Boswell’s 1773 tale of his journey to the Isle of Skye with a seasick Samuel Johnson.

    George Orwell relates how in 1936 Wigan “nearly everyone seems very badly dressed and youths on corners markedly less smart and rowdy than in London”; in the following entry, Mungo Park recounts that on a 1796 African trip “the king, whose name was Daisy Koorabarri, was not to be distinguished from his subjects by any superiority in point of dress; a bank of earth, about two feet high, upon which was spread a leopard skin, constituted the only mark of royal dignity.”

    There are between one and three entries – ranging from half a page to two pages in total – for each day of the year. Those who like their text in small quantities can savour the book for a full twelve months, reading each day’s entries at the relevant point in the calendar.

    Yet it is easy to gobble up months at a time, mesmerised by the mish-mash of contemporary concerns about wifi to seventeenth-century tales of travellers dining on beaver tail, bear and camel meat.

    The format of the books means one is never bored with tedious accounts of the duller moments, as the editing has been craftily performed by others.

    Many of the authors are professional writers, together with painters, explorers, botanists, political leaders and tourists. Most are Anglophone, including Samuel Pepys, Captain James Cook, Mary Shelley, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Morris, Charles Dickens, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac, Alan Bennett and Bruce Chatwin. There is also a smattering of European and Indian writers such as Christopher Columbus, Michel de Montaigne, Simone de Beauvoir and Rajaram I, the Rajah of Kolhapoor.

    The locales range from Easter Island (Jacob Roggeveen, 1722) to Brighton (which the Rajah of Bobbili likens to Bangalore) with all the continents in between.

    One thing that strikes the modern reader is the arduousness of pre-modern journeys. Before the era of jet travel, voyages were truly exacting and the misery of travel is well documented in this volume. Writing in 1934, Wilfred Thesiger appears to take these dangers in his stride: “I have not seen any horse in Aussa, though I have seen some mules and donkeys. As I was going to bed I killed two tarantulas in my tent. Beastly things.”

    The book also pulses with the wonder of foreign lands. Travelling in the US in 1846, Edwin Bryant marvels at the physical attributes of Native Americans: “Many of the women, for regularity of features and symmetry of figure, would bear off the palm of beauty from some of our most celebrated belles.

    A portion of the Sioux women are decidedly beautiful.” In 1914 Ernest Shackleton describes Antarctic recreation: “We remained moored to a floe over the following day, the wind not having moderated; indeed it freshened to a gale in the afternoon, and the members of staff and crew took advantage of the pause to enjoy a vigorously contested game of football on the surface of the floe alongside the ship.”

    And arriving in the Barbados in 1932, Evelyn Waugh finds welcome refreshment: “Dropped anchor about 7 and went ashore to the Aquatic club to bathe and drink rum swizzles. Returned to ship for breakfast and later went ashore to Bridgetown.”

    This hardback volume is handsomely produced and includes a selection of vintage photographs that add considerably to the magic of the writing. Simone de Beauvoir tells of “becoming a different me” in New York, and with this delightful book, we can all share in the transformative powers of travel, a bit at a time.

    A Traveller’s Year: 365 Days of Travel Writing in Diaries, Journals and Letters is compiled by Travis Elborough and Nick Rennison and published by Frances Lincoln Ltd. RRP: £25. ISBN: 9780711236080

  • Lost in the City: photographs of London’s office workers

    Lost in the City – Nicholas Sack 620
    Photograph: Nicholas Sack/Hoxton Mini Press

    Five men in black suits and crisp white shirts stride with purpose along a pavement, casting shadows between the monumental columns of the Bank of England. A photographer lurks in full view – beyond the frame, of course – and freezes the image in time. A newspaper twisted on the floor is the only trace of discord in this clean, colourless shot.

    Nicholas Sack has been photographing London’s financial district for 30 years, and his new book, Lost in the City, published by Hoxton Mini Press, is a striking collection pulled together from the last decade.

    The project shows office workers moving uniformly through the streets, or taking a brief break, while the City’s architecture looms oppressively behind and above. The figures are like characters in science fiction – a matrix of the capital.

    Sack captures a vision of London somewhat unfamiliar to those who have never worked in the City; there’s an ethereal quiet, both cold and clinical, with little of the warmth of, say, the photography of Bob Collins.

    Instead, Sack’s work is an arena of alienation and testosterone, charged almost like advertisements for corporate fashion. Faces are generally turned away, expressionless or otherwise lost, and interaction seems relatively rare, but for those clicking into the digital world.

    Previously a rock drummer, Sack finds musicality – a rhythm and beat – in the corridors and caverns of the territory. Typically shooting at lunchtime, when the sun is high, he sees patterns and symmetries in the buildings and their shadows, which mimic the repetitive routines of nine-to-five commerce. Although the voyeuristic images hint at a degree of impulsiveness, many will have demanded extraordinary patience.

    In one shot, of a woman walking beneath an office block fronted by rows upon rows of large windows, a shard of darkness slices through the centre of the building; it’s a perfect composition, meticulous in its geometric alignments and typical of the wider body of work. I imagine Sack waiting all day for it.

    Others images catch the city’s relentless urge to plan and build on top of itself, with scaffolding climbing into the sky and posters displaying a computer-generated future.

    Lost in the City – Nicholas Sack 620 (2)
    Photograph: Nicolas Sack/ Hoxton Mini Press

    In his introduction to the volume, Iain Sinclair draws a comparison with Robert Frank’s 1951 City of London exposures; this is a spot-on reference that pays dues to the haunting, unreal quality of the prints. Other influences include Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Henry Wessel.

    As much as Lost in the City is a document of a strange place and its people, it is also one of the photographer’s own journeys through, and complicated relationship with, his chosen zone. The title illuminates this duality, pointing to both the photographer’s urgent need to shoot and his subjects’ ultimately aimless wandering.

    Lost in the City is published by Hoxton Mini Press. RRP: £12.95 ISBN: 9781910566039

  • ‘In a white-dominated industry black issues become a shorthand’

    Diversity in publishing.
    Founder of Jacaranda Books Valerie Brandes

    Across North London, just outside the historic Hampstead Cemetery, an independent publishing house is breaking ground for diverse voices in publishing – and founder Valerie Brandes holds her upbringing in Hackney responsible for her motivation, and her success.

    Founded three years ago, and named after a tree that grows from the Caribbean to the Himalayas, Jacaranda aims to provide a space for unheard voices “as cosmopolitan as our city” – a vision of London born out of Brandes’ own childhood.

    “I grew up in Stoke Newington, among so many different cultures. The whole neighbourhood would be playing together, running in the streets: Turkish, Greek Cypriots, English, the Barbadian family over the road, the Irish families… I wouldn’t say it was perfect, but compared to what we have today, it made you aware of how other people lived – I had this understanding of cultures, and difference.”

    That upbringing has guided Brandes’ life, and her career: throughout her time at the University of Exeter, two decades spent living in the USA (where, she recalls, she observed the damaging ‘cultural cul-de-sac’ that monoethnic societies can encourage) and her return to the London publishing industry with Profile Books. There is a phrase that Brandes comes back to often, which seems to ground her, and against which she measures her experiences of ethnicity across her life: “I’m a Hackney girl!”

    What does being ‘a Hackney girl’ mean to her? “It brings to mind a sense of pride, and a feeling like I’ve been well brought up. Growing up at that time in Hackney was not by any stretch an ideal situation in economic terms, but we were never ignorant of other people’s lifestyles and cultures. We were united as a working class community, and that kept a sense of connection between all kinds of people.”

    On her return to London, Brandes was brought back into contact with the UK publishing industry, which is still struggling to support the growth of diverse voices, in terms of both ethnicity and gender. “The lack of diversity in publishing,” Brandes suggests, “is ultimately to do with class, not race, but it has the same effect.

    “All these publishing houses offer unpaid internships, which only certain people can afford to take on. Then it’s those people who are first in line when full-time positions come around.”

    As we talk, it is clear there is tension in Brandes’ mission between promoting the voices that have long been sidelined in British publishing, and not being seen as a ‘niche’ publisher.

    It is clear there is a need for the former. “What happens in a white-dominated industry is that black issues become a shorthand,” Brandes says. “When I set out to found Jacaranda, the role that I thought I could play, the service I could offer, was to show that outside the media-appropriated image of blackness in this country, there is a depth of talent, and interest and variety and brilliance that is completely disregarded.”

    At the same time, however, Brandes hesitates to call it a ‘gap in the market’. “I don’t see it as a gap, really. We are straddling two worlds, doing the thing that we do. We’re interested in good writing – if it’s black, white, Polish, Congolese, it doesn’t matter! That’s what we’re able to offer.”

    Of special satisfaction, though, is their involvement with Hackney-raised authors Stephen Thompson and Irenosen Okojie. “It’s great to be working with authors from all around the world, regardless of their background, but even more amazing to be able to say we’re working with two authors from just down the road from where I grew up.” Brandes and Thompson just spoke together on the topic of diversity in publishing at the Henley Literary Festival.

    Brandes sees Jacaranda as built upon a heritage of pioneering publishers in the UK supporting diverse voices. She takes her inspiration from publishers like Bogle-L’Ouverture and Tamarind Books.

    “They were founded to address the fact there were no black books for black children in the eighties in Britain,” explains Brandes. “Honestly, it’s hard now to do what we do, but to do that then? It gives me a feeling of standing on shoulders, and a lot of confidence.’ She pauses, and concludes: ‘And that’s something else I got from being a Hackney girl. I went away for 20 years, and I do believe that growing up in Hackney carried me through. ‘I’m a Hackney girl,’ I’d always say, ‘I can handle this’.”

  • How two authors attempted to exhaust a place in London

    Collage by Laura Phillimore for An attempt at exhausting a place in London
    Collage by Laura Phillimore for An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in London

    “Seagulls circle over the Town Hall… A man carries an umbrella, folded… A small child with a yellow balloon.” For some, these everyday observations are not worth dwelling on, but for two local authors such details are what truly makes up the life of a place.

    For their new book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in London, Sarah Lester and Nathan Penlington set themselves the task of sitting in the cafés surrounding Hackney Town Hall and creating a written record of “that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens”.

    It would call on most people’s reserves of patience and stamina to withstand 20 minutes of scribbling, but the authors kept at it for a weekend, becoming uniquely attuned to the urban environment in the process.

    “Just trying to pay more attention to stuff is a hard thing,” says Penlington, a poet and performer from North Wales who has lived on and off in Hackney for 20 years. “I think the rewards are greater though. I think if you just slow down and try and pay attention, particularly if it’s an environment that you live in, you can get a real essence of what the place and people are like.”

    For the duration of three days, the authors alternated between tables at Stage 3 café, Artisserie, Hackney Picturehouse and Baxter’s Court on Mare Street. They worked alone, creating separate accounts of the square and what was happening around them.

    “I like how unexceptional the space is,” says Lester, an anthropologist, writer and Hackney resident. “A lot of people laughed when we told them where we were doing it, but it’s more interesting than doing it in say Leicester Square, which is a bit more homogenous in terms of the people there.”

    Sarah Lester (left) and Nathan Penlington (right) read at the book launch in Stage 3 café
    Sarah Lester and Nathan Penlington read from the book at its launch at Stage 3 café

    It was a grey weekend in October 2014 when the pair set about their experiment, a date that marked 40 years since the French writer Georges Perec embarked on a project to describe everything he saw in Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris.

    “I’m really interested in experimental literature and read a lot of Perec when I was younger and liked his approach.” Penlington explains.

    “Perec started in the 1970s to be interested in place and memory and set off on a number of little projects. One was to try and remember places that he’d lived in at various points and revisit them and describe them.

    “But with his book An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris he set out in three days to try and catalogue everything that happened pretty much in the same way we did it.

    “The result is very much a document of that time and place and I thought on the 40th anniversary it’d be quite good if we could try and genuinely capture a different time and a different place and to see if that would work.”

    When I heard about the project my first reaction went something along the lines of what a great idea but will it work as a book?

    But it does. The observations draw on human experience, are self-aware, witty, plaintive and tender. You identify with the teenage boy in a tracksuit trying to kick a pigeon, or the girls singing out loud using McDonalds cups as microphones, because it may have been you – or perhaps it was you.

    And as an object, the book includes some capital (in both senses of the word) illustrations: one collage by visual artist Laura Phillimore shows a map of constellations around old buildings and municipal squares, while the cover image, by artist Keira Rathbone, is an image of Fenchurch Street in the City, made entirely using the keys of a typewriter.

    “It’s such a simple act and I did feel so much more connected to Hackney afterwards. I think that was one of the nicest outcomes of our time doing it,” Lester says.

    An Attempt at exhausting a place in London - Cover 620
    Typewriter art: view of the City by Keira Rathbone

    In another 40 years the book could serve as documentary evidence of a time and place completely lost to the march of progress and change. The authors recently went to Paris, and whilst there they couldn’t resist visiting Place Saint-Sulpice to see how it measured up with the version Perec wrote about.

    “From reading Perec’s version it’s pretty much an average square and now it’s really flashy,” explains Lester. “I only say that from the experience of reading Perec’s account, but it did seem quite ordinary and it’s very opulent now. I imagine it will be very interesting in 40 years time to see if Hackney will be like that as well.”

    An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in London is published by Burning Eye Books. RRP: £9.99 ISBN: 9781909136595

    An attempt at exhausting a place in London – Nicola Gaudenzi
    Hackney Council’s caped crusader. Image by Nicola Gaudenzi