The Passengers: Shortlisted for The Rathbones Folio Prize 2023

Product Information

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. The Passengers by Will Ashon review – voices of a nation". the Guardian. 4 August 2022 . Retrieved 2 September 2022. It’s beautiful to share, you know. I think we are here to share. Share happiness, share love, share our things. Our things are not for ourselves. They are better when we share them. The closest thing to Ashon’s methodology in contemporary writing is the form of oral history pioneered by Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievitch. Like the Belarusian’s histories of Soviet and post-Soviet life, Passengers is formed from other people’s words, edited and arranged. Unlike Alexievitch, though, Ashon is not creating a history of a particular moment or phenomenon, but a record of the unfocused normal in all its randomness.

It looks like it’s wobbly. The ground looks like it’s shaking or something. Because the pieces don’t quite fit, so it looks like it’s wobbly. The person might be wobbling. It looks like an optical illusion, because she’s standing but it looks like she’s sitting down at the same time. I think he took a picture and then maybe split the picture into pieces, like maybe gradually cut it and then fixed it together. It looks like it is one thing but then you realise it’s lots of little pieces. Like, this would be one country, that would be another country, that would be a different country. It would look like it’s one picture, but it would be lots of different pictures. Then you can kind of tell a story, cos there’ll be lots of ideas. Otherwise if you actually know what’s happening, it’s not that interesting. London, Open Pen (21 May 2020). "Not Far From The Junction". Open Pen . Retrieved 2 September 2022. There’s so much room for projection. You can read anything into anything. Sometimes when I’m sad I’ll text my boyfriend and then, whatever he replies it will read as unsympathetic. You know what I mean? It doesn’t really matter what it says because you’re in that headspace. Ashon was educated at Countesthorpe Community College and Balliol College, Oxford. [1] In the mid-1990s he worked as a music journalist specialising in hip hop for publications including Trace, Muzik and Hip Hop Connection. [2] In 1997 he started the record label Big Dada Recordings in conjunction with Ninja Tune, signing and releasing albums by artists including Roots Manuva, Diplo, Speech Debelle and Wiley. [2] I tried killing myself. I tried hanging myself after I come out. It actually helped with my PTSD because I’ve got brain damage to me memory, so I can’t remember a lot of me time in the army, do you know what I mean? It kinda worked, kinda helped in a way, yeah [laughs]. I was hanging for that long that I damaged me memory.

Other Will Ashon Books

It’s summer 1965 and Marsha, Emily and Vincent are at the beach. Rosenkrantz spent a summer recording her conversations with her two best friends and the result is a Woody Allen script with less creepy sexual dynamics (although the politics of race still leave something to be desired). Extracted from The Passengers by Will Ashon (Faber) which is shortlisted for the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize. The winner is announced on Monday 27March.

Seemingly simple yet so deeply profound, The Passengers is an absorbing insight into the lives and minds of so-called ordinary people: their hopes and fears and idiosyncrasies at a specific moment in time.’ The main reason I noticed this book was because the cover design immediately brought to mind Craig Taylor's Londoners. This must surely have been intentional. It sounded like a very similar concept -- interviews with "ordinary people" giving insight into their lives. 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! 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.' The Passengers by Will Ashon (Faber) is shortlisted for the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize. The winner is announced on Monday 27March.While Ashon refuses to soften reality, that hope is a running theme. Despite interviewees recounting the darkness of their lives – from poverty, homelessness and drug abuse to police violence and the brutal purgatory of immigrant detention centres – this is, finally, a hopeful book, and a compassionate one. It is above all else, it seems, about the kind of compassion made possible by seeing normality through other people’s eyes. We might be, as the immigrant who lends Ashon his title says, “passengers” in our own lives: always passing through. But as the utterance that begins and closes the book suggests, we have good reasons, too, to “want to stay and stay and never go”.