London, Open Pen (21 May 2020). "Not Far From The Junction". Open Pen . Retrieved 2 September 2022. You can’t be flippant about Alexievich, so I’ll leave it to her to do the talking (which seems somehow appropriate): ‘This is the way I see and hear the world: through voices, through details of everyday life. This genre – capturing human voices, confessions, testimonies – allows me to use all of my potential, because one has to be at the same time a writer, a journalist, a sociologist, a psychologist, and a priest.’ Ashon, Will (November 2018). Chamber Music: Enter the Wu-Tang (in 36 Pieces). Granta Books. ISBN 9781783784035.

The book makes you feel less alone. It opens the walls of the boxes we all trade our language and emotions in and lets us travel among ourselves." — Max Porter The Passengers by Will Ashon (Faber) is shortlisted for the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize. The winner will be announced on Monday 27March at the British Library.

Will Ashon

From October 2018 to March 2021, the English novelist and nonfiction writer Will Ashon spent 30 months in a state of deep listening. He spoke to 100 people from across the UK by phone, online, or while hitchhiking. Like the men and women sporting cardboard confessions in a Gillian Wearing photograph, they told him secrets. They dug up half-forgotten memories, revealed hopes and dreams. He filleted those testimonies for vivid details, and juxtaposed them to hint at strange echoes and shared frequencies. Each is presented anonymously – no headings, no timestamps, no coordinates. In this way a nation’s psyche comes to the surface. The Passengers is not just an oral history of the contemporary moment but, drenched in mood and texture, renders the country itself as a sonic collage. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

a b Marianne Brace (15 February 2008). "Will Ashon: a thoroughly modern novelist". The Independent. Archived from the original on 26 February 2010 . Retrieved 19 May 2009. Ashon’s gloriously polyphonic book scales the heights. A deeply felt and humane portrait of where we are.’ His mum dreamed it was the Resurrection Day. The end of the world. She was out on a beach with the whole family and all of a sudden the waves of the sea were going all on top of us. And the whole world, every single person in the world, just came to where that sea is. And the water was going on top of us. I was running, trying to get to shelter or whatever. But there was nowhere to go – except that sea. In this particular dream, while everybody is running into that sea and getting under that particular wave that’s coming through, she was saying, Repent to God, repent to God, repent to God. Cos what’s about to happen is worse. In our religion we do translate dreams. It’s like a shaken message, y’know? It just shakes you, type of thing. You could argue that the way Woolf slips between consciousnesses inevitably merges them to some extent, but then it seems to me that our consciousnesses overlap, and it’s in those graceful slides from one to another that some part of her genius lies. Not now, Bernard! So I stopped. Instead, I started taping other people and making monologues of their words, crunching them up against other people’s words, simulating conversations or building representations or intersubjective testimonials . I called it direct reported speech, a phrase I was sure I’d seen somewhere, though I couldn’t for the life of me find out where. And what I meant by that was that it felt as if the people who I wrote up in this way were talking directly to the reader with my role that of ghostly ectoplasm, barely visible between the two, every last one of them saying I to you.This book couldn't have come into my life at a better time. It's a guiding mate. It enters like a cat through a window, ready to take your attention and show you what it needs to.' There’s so much good stuff here. Obviously Margo Jefferson is a must, I’m really looking forward to Darren McGarvey’s book, Yomi Ṣode’s Manorism looks right up my street, I have Zaffar Kunial and Daisy Hildyard in a pile somewhere, and I’ve been wanting to read Pure Colour by Sheila Heti since it came out. The conceit of Scary Monsters sounds like my sort of thing, as well. That’s about half of the list already… shame I’m such a terribly slow reader. Hawes, James (22 July 2006). "Review: Clear Water by Will Ashon". the Guardian . Retrieved 12 May 2018.