The Young Team: Granta Best of Young British Novelists 2023

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The Young Team: Granta Best of Young British Novelists 2023

The Young Team: Granta Best of Young British Novelists 2023

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I have a lived experience of a book changing my life,” he said. “So I can’t believe that mine will not change anyone else’s.” Read More Related Articles In its original version, the novel was written in Glaswegian slang, which is almost impossible for anyone from outside the city to understand. To make the book work, Armstrong had to simplify it. “The language particularly took a lot of time. Using social media as teenagers, we were probably the first young Scots who ever translated our spoken Scots dialect into written words regularly,” he says. “Text messaging and MSN Messenger allowed us to write phonetically. We had no idea we were breaking an oral tradition into signified and signifiers and were performing a complex linguistic task. When it came to writing the novel, I had to decide on this as a fixed lexicon code and build it together into a language. Writing it absolutely truthfully can just make it too hard to understand.”

The writing is excellent, the pacing and the way the tension is drawn out in anticipation make this book hard to put down. Without giving too much away, the book also provides hope. It shows a pathway out; that there is some hope for the disaffected; but also it shows the damage caused on the way - those who cannot rise to navigate their way from youth to adult, and stay trapped. I grew up as middle-class in the noughties in Scotland. I also went to a school that’s was just off being classed as impoverished.

In 2021, Graeme presented ‘SCOTLAND THE RAVE’, a BBC documentary exploring Scotland’s rave and PCDJ culture, which was subsequently nominated for a BAFTA Scotland and RTS Scotland Award 2022. Most recently, he wrote and presented ‘STREET GANGS’, a BBC factual series exploring modern Scottish gang culture, drill music and his own past. Azzy Williams makes poor choices. But what other choices did he have? The police, your parents, your school: they all try to push you a different path. Violence begets violence. And yet what choice do you have when you’re trapped in years of intergenerational dynamics, like an understudy actor stepping up to take the lead? You play your part, like you’ve been told countless times before. It’s normal to you. It’s natural.

Azzy Williams is ready. Ready to smoke, pop pills, drink wine and ready to fight. But most of all, he’s ready to do anything for his friends, his gang, his young team. Round here, in the schemes of the forgotten industrial heartland of Scotland, your mates, your young team – they’re everything. Azzy Williams is fourteen; a rising star, this is his life and he loves it. Azzy Williams is seventeen; he’s out of control. Azzy Williams is twenty-one; he’d like to leave it all behind. But a way out isn’t easy to find . . . Inspired by the experiences of its author, Graeme Armstrong, The Young Team is an energetic novel, full of the loyalty, laughs, mischief, boredom, violence and threat of life on these streets. It looks beyond the tabloid stereotypes to tell a powerful story about the realities of life for young people in Britain today. The Young Team by Graeme Armstrong – eBook Details The only thing separating me from anyone in this book is privilege. I had the privilege of not going down a drinks/drugs route because the system wasn’t pitted against me. My parents have money, my parents are still together, I was encouraged to study, it was assumed that I’d be intelligent and academic, I was supported through school by teachers because I was seen as smart because I spoke “well”. ALL of this is privilege that isn’t afforded to a lot of children in Scotland, including today.The Young Team is also a story of overcoming adversity. Over the course of the book the reader follows Azzy through 10 years of his life, living and feeling, courtesy of a literary tempo that adapts to the story, his first drunken experiences, the euphoria of his first drug binges, but also moments of darkness, when he loses one of his friends, and his attempts to escape from addiction.

Graeme experienced many brushes with tragedy as a teenager: Three of his friends suffered heroin overdoses, one of which he had witnessed at a party aged 16. One later died. Though he was very “anti-heroin,” he began to realise it was all around him, shrouded in secrecy and shame.Armstrong encapsulates all of this perfectly. The mentality, the social insistence, the substances, the violence. He describes everything to the point of near nostalgia, yet adds explanations and added pressure which we never would have guessed our boys to be suffering; but, of course, they must have been. The drive of masculine conformity is a strong one, and dangerously precarious. a b Villalba, Juanjo (21 December 2022). "Graeme Armstrong: 'Nostalgia has its place but there is a younger Scottish generation, their stories matter' ". EL PAÍS English. Archived from the original on 29 January 2023 . Retrieved 14 April 2023. I was engrossed from start to finish. Graeme Armstrong is a major new talent and I cannot wait to discover what he does next.

One of them imitated me swaggering about in the classroom and went ‘who’s gonae give YOU a job?’ I told him, ‘I won’t need a job. I’m going to uni.’ I was determined to beat them.” Granta: Eleanor Catton and Saba Sams make Best of Young British Novelists list". BBC News. 13 April 2023 . Retrieved 15 May 2023.

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Trainspotting comparisons are inevitable, as it is written in dialect, set in Scotland and features the drug scene and culture. In both books the overall narrative is about escaping the lower class schemes, escaping the hold drugs have on you, and growing up. But Welsh's Leith in the '90s and Armstrong's Lanarkshire in mid 2000's are different propositions. Get all the latest Glasgow news and headlines sent straight to your inbox twice a day by signing up to our free newsletter.



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