Pushcart nomination in 2023
A pleasurable end to the year with news from Kitchen Table Quarterly that they have nominated my essay ‘Circus Loves’ for the Pushcart Prize. The picture comes from my grandmother’s photo album of 1914. It shows her teen crush, the circus rider Othelia Orlando.
Why not driving is my own form of resistance
Writing this essay for Psyche about why I don’t drive took me on many detours. I thought about public transport. I thought about road movies and the idea of freedom. I thought about climate change and all the many reasons why we need to find alternatives to cars. But I kept coming back to my mother who loved to drive. Here she is in 1968 with our first family car. You can read the essay here.
Winner of Trip Fiction ‘Sense of Place’ contest
I’m so pleased that a story of mine won first prize in the 2021 Trip Fiction ‘Sense of Place’ contest. The judges were novelists Victoria Hislop and Rosanna Ley, publisher Katharina Bielenberg (MacLehose Press), and Tina Hartas (founder of TripFiction).
The story is a fictionalised account of the journey my grandmother made in October 1940, leaving her home in Bangkok to return to Sweden because of the war. You can read it here:
My essay on Henri Bergson, time & my Swedish grandmother
I’m currently researching a creative nonfiction book – working title, Cool Hearts: the story of a Swedish family – and my enquiries have led me into many interesting side alleys. One of the by-products is this essay on Henri Bergson, the nature of time and memory, and my Swedish grandmother, which was published in the digital magazine Aeon/ Psyche (8 September 2020).
Spanish Flu in Sweden, 1918
I’ve written a short piece on the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic in Sweden for Marina Benjamin’s pop-up Corona blog, Garden Among Fires. It’s the first outing for material I’ve been working on for some time now. Postcard from Gothenburg, 1918.
One of Ian Critchley’s Books of 2019
Thrilled to see Live Show, Drink Included picked as one of four short story collections that stood out for writer, reviewer and book blogger Ian Critchley in 2019. Great company to find myself in. This is a snippet from his blog post:
To read his full selection of Books of the Year, 2019, click here.
Edge Hill Award Ceremony
The prize giving ceremony for the Edge Hill Award was on Friday 25th October at Waterstones Piccadilly. David Szaly won both the single story prize and the overall £10K prize for Turbulence, his collection of linked stories about plane journeys. Szaly is brilliant writer, named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2013 and shortlisted for the Booker in 2016, so I have no complaints. Below are pictures of the three of us debut authors reading: Wendy Erskine from her collection Sweet Home, me from Live Show, Drink Included and Chris Power from Mothers. Then there’s Judge Tessa Hadley making her speech and handing David Szaly his award. After that we migrated to the 5th floor for drinks and canapes till 10pm, then on to the pub for more conversations. A wonderfully warm and light-hearted occasion.
Another review for Live Show
Sabotage Reviews is a website established in 2017 ‘to provide dynamic commentary and reviews of small-scale and ephemeral literature that might not otherwise receive critical and public attention’.
Reviewing Live Show on the 31st of August, Joshua Lambert says: ‘it’s the characters rather than any particular snatches of writing that stick in the mind. I have a few minor niggles, perhaps – I didn’t buy the children, for instance – but by and large, Grut’s talent for character is phenomenal.
Children aside, not a single character appears in these pages without provenance, motivation, desires, flaws, and obsessions. This may sound like a given, but it really isn’t; short story writers could learn a lot from Grut.
‘The story which left the biggest impression was undoubtedly the last, ‘Into the Valley‘, a beautiful story about a woman staying by her in-law’s bedside in her last few days before death. What’s most striking about it is the sheer messiness of it all. There’s no romance, no literary acceptance, no thematic resonance in death: it is just awful. The mother-in-law suffers through delusions and night terrors, afraid of death and unwilling to face it head-on, prompting an equally raw reaction from the main character:
“At some ridiculous level I find myself disapproving of her tenacity, as if it’s a kind of greed, a lack of acceptance. I don’t think I’d struggle this hard, not even at the age I am now. Perhaps I don’t love life enough. Perhaps I’ll feel differently when I get to eighty.”
Grut’s tenderness and understanding, present throughout, shines like a halogen bulb here.
Shortlisted for Edge Hill
The news came in this morning via twitter. I’m on the shortlist for the 2019 Edge Hill Prize, the only UK-based award that recognises excellence in a single author short story collection. I am so honoured to be in the company of such wonderful writers. The full list is as follows:
Wendy Erskine – Sweet Home (Stinging Fly)
Vicky Grut – Live Show Drink Included (Holland Park Press)
Chris Power – Mothers (Faber & Faber)
David Szalay – Turbulence (Jonathan Cape)
Simon Van Booy – The Sadness of Beautiful Things (Penguin)
Lucy Wood – The Sing of the Shore (4th Estate)
Vicky Grut 