{"id":2993,"date":"2021-10-11T18:19:01","date_gmt":"2021-10-11T17:19:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/?p=2993"},"modified":"2021-10-11T18:30:21","modified_gmt":"2021-10-11T17:30:21","slug":"the-2021-british-academy-book-prize-for-global-cultural-understanding-recommended-by-patrick-wright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/2021\/10\/11\/the-2021-british-academy-book-prize-for-global-cultural-understanding-recommended-by-patrick-wright\/","title":{"rendered":"The 2021 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, Recommended by Patrick Wright"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Sophie Roell and Patrick Wright<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sophie: <\/strong><\/em><\/span>Through careful research and compelling argument, the books shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding cast light on globally significant problems, says\u00a0Patrick Wright<\/a>, chair of the 2021 jury and Emeritus Professor of Literature, History and Politics at King’s College London. Here he talks us through the books that made the 2021 shortlist as well as last year’s winner, works of nonfiction that “speak directly to the urgent challenges of the times in which we live”.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

W<\/span>hen you\u2019re choosing books\u00a0for this prize<\/a>, you\u2019re presumably looking for\u00a0nonfiction books<\/a>\u00a0that are global in scope. Could you tell me a bit more, particularly about the cultural understanding element?<\/p>\n

Patrick: <\/em><\/strong>We\u2019re looking for books that help us understand where we are now, that help readers grasp what is going on in the world and how people, whatever their lineage and situation, are facing contemporary reality. We\u2019re not at all against studies that dig deep into a problem or initiative as it\u2019s manifested in a particular place or context, but the books that reach our shortlist tend to keep a wider perspective in mind. We like research, of course, but we understand that it doesn\u2019t always have to be done in archives. We also like books that aren\u2019t entirely confined to the internal arguments and, indeed, jargon of their specialism.<\/p>\n

As for your question about culture, it may sometimes be clearer to talk about economic facts and institutional arrangements, but culture shapes how people make sense of all that. In a way, it is as vital as food to defining who we are and how we may in very different ways understand and face challenges and problems. We\u2019re not seeing culture only in artistic terms here. We have nothing against literature, film or painting, but we\u2019re interested more broadly in how people make sense of a world in which they may feel increasingly connected, albeit by abiding injustices as well as by things held in common more equitably.<\/p>\n

Sophie: <\/strong><\/em>And these are books that should be both readable and seriously researched?<\/p>\n

Patrick: <\/strong><\/em>Yes. The key for us is to balance those two priorities. Finding a topic that is significant is not so hard. The challenge for the judging panel is harmonizing the requirement for serious and ambitious research, with the other priority that the books must be capable of engaging an interested but non-specialist reader. The judges tend to spend more time agonizing about that than in defining exactly what we mean by \u2018cultural understanding\u2019!<\/p>\n

Sophie: <\/strong><\/em>Let\u2019s look at the books that have made the cut in 2021. I\u2019m going to go through them in the order they appear in the announcement on the British Academy website. First up is\u00a0Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape\u00a0<\/em>by journalist and author Cal Flyn, who also happens to be our deputy editor.<\/p>\n

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Image credit: The British Academy<\/em><\/p>\n

Patrick: <\/strong><\/em>This is a terrific book that comes from a young writer who reads and researches and does not work as an academic. Cal Flyn has found this urgent theme, and her treatment of it as she explores and \u2018visits\u2019 it around the world, is really arresting. We live in a damaged world that is not going to return to any sort of \u2018pristine\u2019 condition. It\u2019s sometimes called the\u00a0Anthropocene age<\/a>, where human endeavor has entered nature and done possibly irreversible things to it. Flyn has decided to go to places where, for one reason or another, the landscape is no longer sustainable for human life and, as may be, for many other forms of life too. The book asks us to consider \u2018What is the consequence of all this ruination? What is it likely to do to us as well as to nature?\u2019 The result is an intriguingly twisted and adjusted form of nature writing, applied to sites of catastrophe, slow or sudden, where nature and a few strangely resilient people may be finding their way into a new kind of existence.<\/p>\n

She goes to an intriguing collection of places, including the Exclusion Zone at\u00a0Chernobyl,<\/a>\u00a0where she wanders about and looks and reads and researches what\u2019s been going on since those dreadful events which presaged the end of the Soviet Union. It\u2019s a familiar story, but Flyn is characteristically clever about it. She thinks about Tarkovsky\u2019s film,\u00a0Stalker\u00a0<\/em>(1979), which is about a \u201czone\u201d that people have to enter, this alarming, dangerous, unpredictable place, which came to be associated with the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone via a computer game. She goes to some seriously toxic land at Verdun, still contaminated from the\u00a0First World War<\/a>, to Monserrat, where life has been fundamentally disrupted by volcanic explosion, to the city of Paterson on the Passaic, a super industrialized and heavily polluted river in New Jersey, which eventually oozes out into a coastal strait flowing out near New York City. She finds another example closer to home (which, for Flyn, is the Orkneys) on a little island called Swona, which has been abandoned by people and where the cattle have been\u00a0\u2018rewilding\u2019<\/a>\u00a0for long enough to have become rare objects of study.<\/p>\n

Sophie: <\/strong><\/em>Chernobyl has a clear, exotic appeal, but I find it so interesting that it\u2019s also examples from New Jersey and Detroit and places that are closer to home, as it were.<\/p>\n

Patrick: <\/strong><\/em>Detroit is the perfect city for this \u2013 and, incidentally, a place where \u2018white flight\u2019 intensified the slide into dereliction, reminding us that this is not just a story about industrial pollution and global warning.<\/p>\n

Sophie: <\/strong><\/em>What do you walk away from the book with, in terms of global cultural understanding? Is there a conclusion?<\/p>\n

Patrick: <\/strong><\/em>We\u2019ve got books on the shortlist that follow a more academic approach, outlining an argument and drawing it to a considered conclusion. That\u2019s not really how Flyn chooses to work. There is lots about the book that shows she has been reading and thinking about her theme conceptually, and not just observing it superficially. She tends to present us with considered situations and images rather than abstractly formulated conclusions. She closes by heading out into the desert from Palm Springs in Southern California. She passes an increasingly dried up inland sea at a place called Salton. Caused by a man-made breach in the Colorado river in 1905, the floodwaters settled sufficiently to turn the town into a popular resort, the \u2018Salton Riviera.\u2019 A century later, all that is left is a hyper-salted and algae-clogged dead sea in a stinking and poisoned dustbowl. Heading east, she finds another eerily dismal place in an area where a lot of nuclear testing and military training were done. Many of her closing images come from a long-closed Marine base called Camp Dunlop, now known as Slab City thanks to the outcasts\u2014hippies, drifters and \u2018meth heads\u2019\u2014who\u2019ve chosen to move in. You get this more than a little dystopian picture of a new kind of life improvised in a depleted place where even the cactuses might as well be glowing. It\u2019s an image of the world in serious trouble, but it comes with this unexpected sense of \u2018raw splendour\u2019 too.<\/p>\n

Flyn shows a world full of danger and alarm and threat: you never feel at ease in any of these places, and it is clear that great damage has been done to people as well as the flora and fauna. However, the book is not just another depressing \u2018end of the world\u2019 narrative. Flyn finds various forms of natural recolonization and adjustment, many of them very surprising, which give you an indication that, once humans are no longer just churning along in their accustomed ways, other possibilities do emerge in unexpected places. So the book\u2019s sense of disaster comes with a strong sense of possibility and resilience too.<\/p>\n