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Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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But when, towards the end of the war, he was able to travel to mainland Europe to inspect some of the effects of his projects on German soil, something was exposed: he hadn’t foreseen the true consequences of what he was doing. The Royal Society of Literature has awarded Daisy Hildyard its 2023 Encore Award for her sophomore novel, Emergency.

He wasn’t sentimental, noting coolly that while life on Earth is resilient, the human species may, or may not, survive. Daisy Hildyard has confronted our new nature and, bravely, compellingly, makes our shared emergency visible. The most striking change on the ground was observed in the populations of parasitic creatures who thrive on unburied bodies: “‘Rats and flies’ … the multiplication of species that are usually suppressed in every possible way.Can you say more about what your book reveals about human nature in relationship with nature nature? Only the “Colorado beetles carry on crawling, same as before, eating our spuds, gobbling up every last leaf. With everything that is swirling in our world right now, how would you describe where writing is coming from inside of you, and what next you feel compelled to say? In a slanting, revelatory passage, Sharpe describes the physical details of what would have happened to the body of a person thrown overboard: “There have been studies done on whales that have died and have sunk to the seafloor. Hildyard’s feat has been to create a novel that presents itself not as a story but as a complex ecosystem.

There was a small yellowish scar below the outer edge of one of her eyes which very slightly affected its shape, so there was always something unusual about her face, but in that moment she was looking towards the sun and her brown iris seemed to have been set on fire, melting diamonds of golds and oranges wheeling around the rim, which gave her a blind, illuminated fierceness, and I felt afraid of her. When he moves on he leaves behind an empty plastic noodle pot and we stay with that for a while… I imagined that over time, a picture of the area, and its workings, energy, and relationships, would emerge. It can feel impossible, as an individual, to decelerate or exit the systems that make all this happen.Her essay The Second Body, a brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017.

And at the same time, it is also clear that the ecology of disaster is an ecology that extends beyond what any human, or even a culture or collective of humans, can bear witness to. This depiction of Germany’s ruined cities originated as lectures that Sebald delivered in Zurich in 1997. Inside the silence, he says, we “hear our displacement from the position of auditor: as species we hear what our environment hears—and, in listening for silences in that environment, we hear our own displaced position as auditors within the Anthropocene. It’s still unusual for an author who is writing on slavery to pay attention to the residence time of sodium in the ocean. I wonder whether and how much others felt that, in isolation: a powerful sense of entanglement or that the world outside was extra vivid.The kestrel had paused again and my gaze moved up and down, drawing a direct line between them, like a lift between two floors of a building. Daisy Hildyard examines three stories of atrocity that demonstrate how whiteness has inscribed itself onto the land through violence and how human history blurs into the nonhuman world. One spring evening, when I was old enough to be outside and alone, I was sitting above the quarry on the edge of the village when I saw a panel of clay drop away from the facing vertical side and fall into a pool of water.

In the woods and quarry there are foxcubs fighting, plants competing for space, ageing machines, and a three-legged deer who likes cake. Helen Whyrbow: While reading Emergency I was struck by the intricate, minutely detailed descriptions, particularly of sound. He describes the bombing raid as a physical event—its sounds, fires, and the waves of pressure—and as with Sharpe’s account, the piecemeal simplicity of this history is oddly unsettling. It was useful in a practical way to learn to be more patient (with my own writing, as well as with other people’s), and to take pleasure in different kinds of books.Alexievich, on one of her own trips into the Zone, heard the “shrieking” and “helpless cries” of the animals. In the twenty-one years since the geological term “Anthropocene” was popularized by Paul Crutzen, the idea has gained traction among the geological community, though there is still no agreed date for the inception of the Anthropocene as an epoch. Not only in this sort of nature – scenes of cows and trees in a landscape – but also inside my flat or whatever. And we’re obviously here to talk about the London Literature Festival – can you tell me a little bit about what you’ll be doing? Almost every novel I’ve ever read, and I love to read novels, has a very contracted world, and there’s so much that these stories leave out.

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