Passages

Ann Quin (1936-1973) was a working-class writer from Brighton, England. She was at the forefront of British experimentalism in the 1960s along with BS Johnson and Alan Burns, and also lived in the US in the mid-sixties, working closely with US writers and poets including Robert Creeley. Prior to her death in 1973, she published four novels: Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972). A collection of short stories and the fragment of her unfinished last novel, The Unmapped Country (edited by Jennifer Hodgson), was published by And Other Stories to great acclaim in 2018. Quin’s novel Berg was republished by And Other Stories in 2019, to be followed by Three in 2020 and her remaining novels in subsequent years.

‘Passages stirred up a certain kind of curiosity that I hadn’t felt kindling in me for so long. It’s almost like the omnipotent curiosity one burns with as an adolescent – sexual, solipsistic, melancholic, fierce, hungry, languorous – and without limit.’ Claire-Louise Bennett‘To read Passages is to look down through clear water. It’s absolutely lucid and blindingly reflective. It moves and you don’t know how deep it goes. Perhaps there’s a body down there. Perhaps it’s your own.’ Joanna Walsh