I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to. And perhaps both books wrestle with grief writing about ghosts allows us to puzzle through that heaviness.ĭo you welcome being lined up in an emancipatory black tradition? Or should a writer like you be allowed to speak more individually? Writing about spirits is a way to counteract some of that, because the people of the past are allowed to be present in the moment and tell their own (true) stories, and often, there is a reckoning between the living and the dead. Many people in power are attempting to rewrite the past and the present to fit their narrative.

Well, we’re at a difficult moment in history. Is it just coincidence that Lincoln in the Bardo, the Booker prize winner that others have linked to your work, also goes into a spirit world to communicate the sorrows of corporeal life? We had to eat cheap meals that would feed a lot of people because there were so many of us. My grandmother made biscuits almost every morning, and we ate a lot of red beans and rice. So I remember the smell of the burning oak and pine most strongly, and the sulphur smell of the gas. There was a wood-burning stove in the living room because the house lacked central heat, and gas-burning heaters installed in the hallway. There were 13 of us in a four-bedroom house, and it was one of the happiest times of my life, surrounded by so many people who I loved. For three or so years, my family lived in my grandmother’s house, which is the house my mom grew up in. I grew up in a lot of different homes when I was younger: my parents rented trailers and small, boxy houses set high on cement block pillars. Place is important to my writing I believe that if a reader gets a clear picture of the place where a character is from, then they can understand what motivates the character, what limits him or her. Did you draw on sounds and smells of the home you grew up in? There are few physical descriptions of the family home at the centre of Sing, Unburied, Sing, yet a strong sense of it comes across. It is told chiefly through the eyes of Leonie, a drug-taking mother, and her watchful teenage son, Jojo, and unsentimentally conveys the pain of bereavement and the risks of life on the edge of survival. Her latest novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, has been nominated for the National Book award and the Kirkus prize.

Her novel Salvage the Bones and her memoir Men We Reaped have both won prizes, while the collection of essays she edited and contributed to, The Fire This Time, is a US bestseller and is published in theUK next April.

Jesmyn Ward, 40, who grew up and lives in Mississippi, has been hailed as a tough yet poetic new literary voice.

Sing unburied sing amazon