Sunday, May 11, 2025
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Rhodes Must Fall join campaign for student to continue studies

Ethan Croft
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Rhodes Must Fall join campaign for student to continue studies

Oxford student groups, including Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) and the Oxford University Africa Soceity (OUAS), have gathered in support of a campaign to crowdfund the education of Gilbert Mitullah, a Kenyan masters student who faces losing his place at the University if he does not raise £25,000 by Friday.

Mitullah, of St Antony’s college, was named last year as one of the 100 most influential young Kenyans of 2016, after launching two social enterprises focused on teaching employment skills to Kenyan school children.

However, due to a visa delay, this week he faces the possibility of losing his place at Oxford if he does not raise enough money to fund his masters in Comparative and International Education.

He was the first Kenyan ever accepted onto the course.

This funding originally came from a Kenyan company, but due to a visa delay Mitullah’s trip to Oxford was delayed by two weeks and the funding was withdrawn.

He told Cherwell: “I have been trying to find other means of paying my fees, including debt and work, but I have so far been unsuccessful in raising the enormous amount required. I have also tried to reach charitable foundations and trusts, but have so far failed to receive any positive outcomes. I now have an incredibly short time to raise the money or leave Oxford before my visa is cancelled. This would mean that I would be unable to complete my studies.

“I would ask people to support me in completing my studies by giving whatever amount possible. This will allow me to go home and support others who would need my effort and knowledge to complete their primary and secondary school education successfully. I have spent the past nine years giving my time to mentorship and free legal aid in the rural areas of Kenya. I may not be able to change the whole world, but I am able to change someone’s world in Kenya with the knowledge and skills I gain at Oxford.”

One anonymous supporter donated £2,500 to Mitullah on Thursday.

A spokesperson for Oxford University told Cherwell: “The Department of Education and St Antony’s College are both aware of Gilbert’s situation and are working with him to find a possible solution.”

Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) is an organisation supporting Mitullah’s campaign to stay in Oxford, urging its more than 6,000 followers to buy Gilbert a ‘virtual coffee’, by donating minimum of five pounds each before the Friday deadline.

Femi Nylander, a major figure in the Oxford chapter of Rhodes Must Fall, told Cherwell: “Gilbert’s lack of funding due to a delayed visa and corporate bureaucracy highlights everything that is wrong with UK’s visa service, which delayed a black African Oxford student for no good reason. The lack of a sufficient institutional response from the university provided him with little support. International students and African students have very high fees indeed. He is a victim of circumstance, and as one of the few African Oxford students we have gathered together to try to change those circumstances.”

In response to this support, Mitullah commented: “Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford has been very gracious in sharing my message to their followers and I appreciate them. I have received support from the Oxford University Africa Society as well as St Antony’s College members and the Oxford community.

“I also received great support from the Oxford Gospel Choir, which I sing in, and my church, Emmanuel Church, has given me immeasurable spiritual support in this whole process.”

A spokesperson from Oxford University’s Africa Society told Cherwell: “One of our objectives as the University of Oxford Africa Society is to facilitate increased access to and funding for an Oxford education for African scholars. Gilbert’s situation is one example of how wide the funding gap faced by African students is. It presents an opportunity for the university to prioritize initiatives that allow talented students to benefit from and contribute to the university, regardless of where they come from and how much money they have.”

This news comes in light of Oxford’s Rhodes Must Fall Campaign’s re-launch meeting, held at Linacre college on Saturday evening. The organisation set out two new initiatives that go beyond the removal of the Cecil Rhodes statue at Oriel College.

The first is the development of a new interactive map with three layers denoting “problematic iconography”, areas of decolonial protest, and spaces where people have experienced racially motivated oppression, including non-University locations. At the meeting, it was said that the interactive map “will last with the movement for years to come.”

Submissions to the map will remain anonymous so that colleges cannot penalise students who identify images and symbols of colonialism.

RMF in Oxford are also developing an ‘alternative syllabus’, compiling reading lists of black and minority ethnic (BME) writers. It was claimed that Oxford’s present curriculum “perpetuates colonialism”. The ‘alternative syllabus’ reading lists currently encompass English and political theory, but RMF aims to expand across different fields, including STEM (science, technology, engineering, and maths) subjects.

It was emphasised in the group discussion that rather than focusing exclusively on Oxford University, the ‘alternative syllabus’ “should be passed on to the BME community at large.”

The discussion was interspersed with chants of “de-, de-colonise”.

“Krapp isn’t quite of this world”

Sîan Bayley
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“Krapp isn’t quite of this world”

Beatrix Grant’s innovative production of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Rockaby brings together, in original combination, two plays which both focus on ‘the audible word and the distorting power of retrospect’. Having completely sold out on its opening night at the Burton Taylor Studio, this production has attracted excited interest, and rightly so. While not always comfortable to watch, the intensity of Christopher Page and Natalie Woodward’s performances are simultaneously mesmerising and thought-provoking, as they investigate what it means to be look back on one’s life in old age.

Upon entering the small enclosed space of the BT Studio, the audience is met with the hunched figure of Page, as Krapp, at his desk, mindlessly staring at nothing. The lights are dimmed and Krapp begins to shuffle about in his seat, eventually standing up to get a banana, which he methodically peals, his eyes continuing to stare out into the distance. The first five minutes are performed in complete silence as the audience watches Krapp wander about. It is only when he reads his diary aloud that the oppressive silence is broken, giving the audience some sense of relief before they discover more about Krapp’s past.

Page does an excellent job portraying a man far older than himself. His gruff Irish voice and hacking cough give a gritty edge to his speech, even if his shuffling movements are somewhat stompy and exaggerated. His delivery of the strange sounding word ‘spool’ is almost euphoric, as if he is inhaling a drug, and gives his performance a spiritual quality, suggesting that Krapp isn’t quite of this world. As the play progresses, however, and we listen to the recordings of Krapp’s 39-year-old self, a more detailed picture of his life begins to emerge. Far from the distant stranger of the first half, we learn of Krapp’s love-life and then of his frustration. Page stares out into the audience for the first time and fixes his eye on me. I feel like he is blaming me for his failures, and it is a chilling sensation.

Krapp’s exit then transitions into the beginning of Rockaby. It is this beautifully choreographed scene change, accompanied by Ted Mair’s quasi-religious sound-scape, that highlights the emotional connections between two protagonists who both seek company but pass each other as strangers. As Page’s Krapp forcefully pushes his desk off stage, Woodward creeps on and slowly settles into her rocking chair, before a haunting voice begins to speak. The rhythmic verse is in time with the rocking of the chair, as it moves between light and dark, symbolising how the woman is on the edge of death. In a play with very few spoken lines, Woodward still manages to shape her performance as a woman bent on her own destruction, quietly asking for more whenever the voice stops. Again, this is well staged, but I noticed some sings of impatience in the audience towards the end. While Rockaby is short, its repetitive nature and dark lighting makes it difficult to justify being placed directly after an hour-long performance of Krapp’s Last Tape without an interval.

Overall, however, this combination of lesser known Beckett plays is well put together and expertly choreographed. The minimalist and intimate setting of the BT Studio enables the plays to be performed as Beckett intended, and Page and Woodward’s performances are to be commended for their emotional pull, and strange sense of otherness.

Food diary: why brunch?

Ellie Duncan
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Food diary: why brunch?

This isn’t the first time I have written about brunch for a hardhitting student publication. Given the task of explaining the wonders of hall food in my college’s most recent Freshers’ guide, I described the concept of brunch way as “a space for creating what you want”. As egotistical as it might seem to quote myself at the beginning of this article, the point I would make is this: brunch seems to have grown into a personalised art, where the vagueness of category permits a whole range of different possibilities. Every brunch experience is different, and this is something that deserves to be truly celebrated.

You only need to look on Instagram to understand the immense popularity of brunch and its aesthetic. There are hundreds of accounts devoted simply to documenting brunch in London or New York or Melbourne, and every photo is always beautifully presented. The same classics reappear over and over again, though often in innovative forms—eggs, bacon, pancakes, blueberries, and of course avocado. But there are also some more unexpected options out there to discover, like doughnuts, broccoli fritters, or a good fig and hazelnut babka. The hybrid meal of brunch is a delicious testament to the imagination.

Unsurprisingly though, the original settings for brunch were quite different from what we now might instinctively recognise. Brunch has blossomed into a widespread cultural phenomenon, but it started out as a meal for aristocratic hunters in England, wanting a hearty meal in between sojourns into the field, and the snappy name itself was first coined in an 1895 edition of the magazine Hunter’s Weekly.

Some believe Chicago is the true birthplace of brunch, as the morning stopover point for 1920s film stars travelling to Hollywood by rail who needed a sophisticated late-morning bite. An ironic connection for those of us in student journalism is that in the USA, the importance of brunch has been allegedly traced back to the traditional eating habits of a newspaper reporter. As with the eternal pizza debate, it would seem brunch is another institution where everyone clambers to take credit for creating this masterpiece of a meal.

Rightly then, Cherwell’s recent Food and Drink Awards included best hangover brunch as a category of its own. In my experience, nothing cures a hangover quite as well as a perfectly crispy and golden hash brown from an unnamed northern college. Certainly brunch is a strong point of the Oxford food scene, with countless great options like the Handlebar Café, Green’s Café and the winning George Street Social.

Finally, with its pleasingly unspecified time brackets, brunch is a meal that also offers a somewhat soothing relief from the often minutely scheduled timetable of university life. With an unending range of possible combinations, brunch can be tailored to any time or taste. And, just as it started out as a savvy response to culinary needs, the comforting and versatile spirit of brunch ensures its enduring popularity.

Review: The Optimists

Matthew Palmer
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Review: The Optimists

Suzy Cripps’ The Optimists, a tightly-paced romp of hypocrisy, coincidence and curtains, is a solid comedy of errors in the best of British tradition.

Involving a bankrupt owner of a football club, an aristocratic Communist society, and various intertwined relationships, the play contains all the classic elements of a good comedy of errors—coincidence, farce and a dead body, all neatly tied up with a spread of more-or-less happy marriages. However, there is more than just agreeable humour in the play; the absurd hypocrisy of the Communist characters in particular at times hints at some sharp satire beneath the cosy surface, as do the less-than-romantic relationships on display. A grubbing obsession with material value and money is evident throughout, and none of the characters (excepting, perhaps, the mysterious Sophia) are immune. There is a certain bite in The Optimists, which punctuates and complements the gentle ribbing and free-flowing laughs.

The intimate space of the Burton-Taylor complemented the play, allowing the audience to notice the small quirks and tics that made the actors’ performances so effective. Pride of place must go to John Livesey (playing Sergei) and Elizabeth Mobed (Tatiana), whose rapid-fire dialogue and comic timing were particularly memorable. The number of characters was just apt—small enough so that they were individually distinct, but not to the extent that the stage felt empty or lacking in plot threads. Particularly strong was the physical comedy on display; it was very well done and extremely funny, especially during later scenes involving the attempt of several characters to hide evidence of a dead body while having breakfast in a local café.

While the first two scenes were somewhat slow (perhaps indicative of opening night tremors), once the play got into gear the action was quick, the dialogue slick and the laughs frequent. New characters are introduced throughout the length of the play, often as an abrupt sucker-punch to throw yet another spanner into the works for the hapless conspirators. Not all of these coincidences are expected either—while the play follows a fairly traditional format, there are enough surprises to prevent the audience becoming too comfortable.

Overall, The Optimists is a hugely enjoyable ride that is guaranteed to amuse, and a solid debut from a talented new playwright.

Recipe: Gluten-free pancakes

Naomi Bradshaw
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Recipe: Gluten-free pancakes

Weekends are a time when pancakes are a must. They are an essential staple of brunch, and a personal favourite of mine. I love them American-style—fluffy and stackable. These ones are so simple, requiring only a couple of ingredients, and are also infinitely customisable to fit the seasons or whatever is tickling your taste buds. You might like them spiced with half a teaspoon of cinnamon one weekend, and the next add some chocolate chips or cacao nibs for a chunky-monkey style plate of heaven, or blueberries for an all-American treat.

As for toppings, maple syrup is always a must—there’s just something about the moist sweetness which, in my opinion, is essential to every pancake experience. Any fresh fruit or frozen berries are another great staple. To make pancake perfection, I’ll also drizzle over some smooth peanut butter—it’s the ultimate indulgence! These pancakes happen to be both gluten free (so long as you use gluten free oats) and dairy free, and I am sure that they would work if you tried them with chia or flax egg substitutes for vegans, so that everyone can enjoy the glory of pancakes on a Sunday morning.

Ingredients:

1 banana (or one small roasted/steamed sweet potato)
2 egg
1/4 cup oats
1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tbsp coconut oil

Optional add-ins:
1/2 tsp cinnamon, any other spices
Chocolate chips
Cacao nibs

Topping suggestions:
Maple syrup
Fresh/frozen fruit
Peanut butter for drizzling

Serves 1 hungry person

Method:

1. Heat a pan over a medium-high heat and melt the coconut oil in the pan.

2. Blend the banana, eggs, oats, and bicarbonate of soda together (along with any spices, if using).

3. Pour the excess coconut oil into the blended ingredients and stir well.

4. Ladle about 2-3 tbsp of batter per pancake into a hot frying pan.

5. If you are adding chocolate chips or blueberries to your pancakes, add them at this stage to allow them to incorporate into the pancake as it cooks.

6. Cook about 3 pancakes at a time in your pan. Leave them alone for 30 seconds to a minute, until you can see them starting to bubble, and that the underside is golden.

7. Then flip them over, and continue to cook until golden brown all over (probably for about another 30 seconds).

8. Repeat until you have used up all the batter.

9. Serve with your choice of toppings and enjoy!

If you enjoy these pancakes please tag me on social media @nomsbynaomi, I would love to see your creations!

Fear, frustration and self-loathing: welcome to an Oxford lecture theatre

Daniel Curtis
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Fear, frustration and self-loathing: welcome to an Oxford lecture theatre

It is Monday, 10.07am. Your lecture has begun, but you feel like your life might be at an end. You’re desperately sprint-walking, clutching your bag as the single tether that could keep you connected to the already-frenetic pace of the morning. You come to realise, as you try to ignore the shin splints which coalesce further with each step, that Oxford was a Very Bad Idea and you will never go to lectures again.

You arrive, and the small room is impossibly full. Did no-one really think that this would happen? C18th print culture is an absolutely banging topic—this was always going to be a sell-out show. You squeeze past the idiots who sit on the end of rows leaving the middle seats free. You have, in your experience of Prelims lectures, deduced that this is for one of two reasons: either they take pleasure in the suffering of others, or they fear all human interaction and they presume that sitting next to a stranger is tantamount to marriage.

You are seated, and, more pressingly, miserable, because not only does the lecturer hate you, you tardy piece of trash, but he is also ridiculously attractive and his clothing and delivery style scream, “I have my life together”. You curse your decision to come, but you are also slightly in love.

You try to piece the fragments of literary goodness together but your brain just wasn’t built to work before midday. Your note making is going well though, signifying that your body is working even if your mind is not. You start to wonder if you should have done sports studies somewhere instead.

Your lecturer makes a joke. It’s a hit, 10/10, five stars. Critics are tipping him for a Tony award. You laugh but you are dying inside.

You are beginning to zone out. It’s been a valiant effort but twenty minutes is all anyone could really expect from you. You try not to think of the science students battling through their second hour of five. You try not to self-attribute the adjective “lazy”. You fail.

As your thoughts drift, you began to realise that all those people on their MacBooks (so many MacBooks) aren’t actually making notes. They are checking their Facebook. Messages fly back and forth as you try in vain to make discernible scrawls with your pen. You are judging. Hard. Suddenly your self-loathing is offset slightly by completely unjustifiable smugness. You are a deity.

You think of the essay you were set yesterday. You consider picking up the books for it from the library next door to the lecture theatre. Maybe this is it, the turning point: you think about leaving your lecture, freshly injected with that sweet, sweet knowledge, to head to the library and start the reading for your next essay.

You know that you’re going to leave it all until the night before the deadline. Why are you like this?

The lecture is winding towards its end. You suspect that you have indeed been taught a few things. Maybe you’ll even use them in your next collection. Maybe it will bump you up from 2:1 to a First. Maybe every lecture you attend is an extra point in your exam papers.

You remember that you never revise for your collections.

The lecture ends. You are released to the wilds of South Parks Road slightly earlier than you were anticipating. You now feel even more guilty than when you were sitting mindlessly, not paying attention. Now you feel like you fabricated a “toothache” to leave school early so that you could go home and play PlayStation after a long day doing your times tables. Pathetic.

Your hatred is exacerbated by the knowledge that inside you, somewhere, is a decent humanities student. Someday, that student will rise, destroy all exams standing in the way of mastery of the subject. Someday, you will be vindicated by outstanding exam scores and they’ll basically beg you to stay on, do all the DPhils, and lecture some unsuspecting undergrads about those books. After all, how hard can it be?

Today is not that day. This had all better be worth it come finals.

Both disturbing and utterly engaging: Suddenly Last Summer

Alice Robinson
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Both disturbing and utterly engaging: Suddenly Last Summer

With the tagline, “Something unspeakable happened last summer”, you might be forgiven for thinking of Aunt Ada Doom’s (Cold Comfort Farm) cry of “I saw something nasty in the woodshed!”, when looking at the promotion material for the Experimental Theatre Club’s new production of Tennessee Williams’ little known play, Suddenly Last Summer.

And indeed, ludicrous Aunt Ada does bear some similarities to the Williams’ own matriarch, Violet Venable, in her obsessive love of a younger male relative and fixation on the past. It is a tribute, therefore, to Sammy Glover’s direction, Williams’ beautifully poetic script, and, most importantly, to Derek Mitchell’s brilliant acting, that at no point in this production does Violet appear ridiculous in any more than a tragic sense. This is a production that takes a while to get going, but which becomes a magnificent, disturbing tour-de-force, led by two superb actors as the protagonists Violet and Catherine.

Mitchell is a revelation as Violet. My hackles were slightly raised by a man playing a woman’s part, but his nuanced and honest performance more than assuaged my doubts. I was astonished to learn that this is his first non-comic stage role whilst at Oxford. The dead-white make-up and grey wig seemed a little too much when he first entered, given the naturalism of many of the other characters, but it soon became clear that this is precisely the point.

Stuck in a luxurious and artificial world of her own creation, complete with regular 5pm frozen daiquiris, Violet rejects the real world and the truth as too ugly to be believed. Mitchell’s dramatic arm gestures, combined with the fragility of his flowery chiffon robe and walking cane, made for a heart-breaking portrait of a woman caught up in her own fantasy. As her on-stage opponent, Mary Higgins was equally excellent. She was given little to do in the first half, but after the interval really came into her own as the equally fragile, but far more honest, Catherine. Pulled and forced about the stage, her emotions were extreme but utterly credible.

I am amazed at the confidence of any stage performer wiling to de-robe in front of an audience, especially in so big a venue as the Oxford Playhouse. Often full-frontal nudity can seem unnecessary, but here it felt carefully and thoughtfully directed, and totally justified. Forcibly stripped of a bright red jumpsuit covered with what looked like Georgia O’Keefe-style paintings, Catherine was constantly being forced to expose herself for all the world to see, to relive over and over again the darkest and most violent memories of her past.

This sense of exposure also haunted the sparse set, which was punctuated only by twisted wire shapes in the sky, swathed sparingly in white strips of material. These, combined with the faded wooden and tin of the supposedly beautiful garden, lent an air of rotting grandeur.

Glover has prefaced her ‘Director’s Note’ in the programme with a quote from famous avant-garde Belgian director, Ivo van Hove. His style of simple staging, yet intense atmosphere, has clearly influenced her work here. Tension is initially established through a bassheavy soundscape created by collaboration between ETC and Garden Building, an artist from Oxford independent label TREMOR. The music is eerily beautiful, and Georgia Bruce has a lovely voice, but, especially in the opening act, it feels like it is being relied upon too heavily.

There are dance interpretations of Catherine from both ‘The Stranger’ (Seamus Lavan) and Sebastian (Cassian Bilton), which are fluid, and well-acted, but play out for far too long. Glover would do better to cut some of this, and trust in her actors to create the dramatic tension.

The cast as a whole is impressive, with Georgia Pearce standing out particularly as Violet’s maid Miss Foxhill, despite having few lines. The effect of having the ever-competent Bilton playing both Sebastian (with hints of Waugh’s character of the same name), and the Doctor works well. On the opening night, some too-subtle lighting choices, and the decision to leave Bilton lounging languidly reading onstage made for an awkward start to the interval, although I am sure Glover and her team will fix this for future performances. Apart from these minor flaws, this production is both disturbing and utterly engaging.

A word from the stalls

Miriam Nemmaoui
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A word from the stalls

What were you expecting from this production?

Well it’s by Experimental Theatre Club so I was expecting it to be pretty experimental. And it was in the Oxford Playhouse so I was expecting big things.

Has it delivered?

Hmm, yeah? I guess it has, but not in the way I was expecting

Describe the production in 3 words.

Uncomfortable, dark, nudity.

Highlight of the production?

When it ended! No, that’s a joke. I think the first half before the interval was good, it was so captivating. The music was sick. I loved the set too.

What would you change?

I would change some of the movement scenes. They were not as smooth as they should’ve been. Sorry, I’m being really shady, aren’t I?

Fittest cast member?

Aaron Skates. I want to adopt him!

Marks out of 10

8/10, I guess. Despite all my criticisms, it was impressive.

Through the Looking Glass: the Auden set

Daniel Villar
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Through the Looking Glass: the Auden set

Modern Oxford was created by poets and novelists. Sure, the University can do its best with videos showing students in jeans and t-shirts, and we can point all we want to research groups winning Nobel prizes. But to the popular imagination, none of that is Oxford. For the public, Oxford is still the city of undergraduates wasting away their time, reciting poetry, drinking heavily, and dressed up at hall while they settle the grand issues of the day. This is the incubator of the great poets and politicians of the future. And perhaps no group of individuals epitomised this more than the Auden Set.

Admittedly, the Auden Set is not a true set. Its members (W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Louis MacNeice) only had three things in common—poetry, Oxford, and left-wing politics. As undergraduates, only Auden and Day-Lewis could have honestly been described as close friends. It was only later, when journalists began to notice the similarities in the trajectories of their lives, that the set was born.

Journalists would later try to imagine that they had other things in common—Auden and Spender’s homosexuality made people question the sexuality of heterosexual Day-Lewis and MacNeice, and some even began to view it as a communist undergraduate cabal. Yet even so, the fact is that four of the greatest poets of the English language in the 20th century all attended our university at the same time as undergraduates.

Auden and Day-Lewis worked together for poetry collections, learning from each other and teaching each other the skills of their art. Day-Lewis, who studied English at Wadham, was instrumental in making Auden, who was at Christ Church, move from a degree in zoology to one in English literature. As undergraduates, Auden and Day-Lewis collaborated in a poetry collection, unimaginatively titled Oxford Poetry. After their undergraduate years, Auden and Day-Lewis went their separate ways, but each still continued to influence each other.

There is a reason why the set of poets is most commonly known as the Auden Set. For although Day-Lewis, Spender, and MacNeice all have their merits, none of them reaches the heights of Auden. Indeed, much of the worst poetry written by the others was written in imitation of Auden’s clipped, political style.

Take Day-Lewis, the man who turned Auden into a poet. His poems suffered for years in imitation of Auden’s style: it is only upon becoming a traditional poet, who eschewed modern poetry for traditional lyricism, such as in his collection Word Over All, that he truly realised his own unique potential.

Auden and Day-Lewis’ relationship shows both the benefits and perils of collaboration. As undergraduates Day-Lewis helped Auden, but later, when master became teacher, his poetry suffered, and only recovered when he stopped collaborating and became independent.

Writing the uncanny and the lyrical

Tilly Nevin
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Writing the uncanny and the lyrical

Although Daisy Johnson, author of FEN and Gillian Cross, a children’s writer, might ostensibly seem to have nothing in common, this talk revealed how much interchange there can be between such different writers if only in terms of principles and practice. It is fitting that Daisy Johnson, a young author herself, was seated next to a champion of literature for children and young adults. She even mentioned how she is currently busy re-reading the Garth Nix series, a series which shaped her writing as a teenager.

The uncanny, the ‘weird’, preoccupies Johnson. She is writing a horror novel, whereas Cross seems to often root her work in contemporary social issues or seems inspired by current events—when she began to write she felt as if the literary market was saturated with work that was “trying to be clever”.

Yet she also came to write because she discovered a love of storytelling when she was raising two young children. Her series The Demon Headmaster too has a sense of the uncanny about it.

As part of Somerville Arts Festival, the two writers answered a joint Q&A and then read excerpts from their books, Johnson reading a short story from FEN and Cross two extracts from her novel After Tomorrow. Johnson’s prose is striking, bold, and beautiful, and the short story she read was immediately gripping, about sexuality and unfettered desire.

Johnson admits that she is obsessed with place, having grown up in a very rural environment, and the descriptions of landscape and rural life permeate and differentiate her work. Lyrical prose creates the uncanny in its description of stark, strange surroundings. Her work is evidently influenced by horror, by the gothic and by fairytale magic realism. It refuses to be defined simply. She has been hailed as one of the upcoming best British writers and having read her work now, I’d very much agree.

Gillian Cross’ first novel, meanwhile, was published in 1979 and is aimed at a very different audience. However, Cross doesn’t like to “speak down” to children and the extract she chose to read from After Tomorrow had a rape scene in it. The narrator, a young boy, doesn’t comprehend what’s happened to his mum, but for an adult audience it’s impossible not to realise. She doesn’t shy away from tough topics: After Tomorrow imagines a world in which the pound has collapsed and British citizens are having to flee their homes and make dangerous journeys abroad.

The book seems even more timely now in the height of the refugee crisis.  Cross said that even writing it at the time was an enormous challenge because it seemed prophetic: at the launch event, her publisher came over to tell her he’d just heard that Cameron had announced that British borders would be closed if Greece left the Eurozone. In the book France closes its borders to British refugees.

The two writers discussed their writing practices, Cross eliciting a gasp from the audience as she admitted to often using ‘Write or Die’ to write her books and Johnson causing a similar ripple of horror as she told us that Sarah Moss often writes a whole novel and then deletes it, only to start again. Both are optimistic about the future of the book industry, Cross especially.

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