Isabel Waidner – författare

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD 2024LONGLISTED FOR THE NOTA BENE PRIZE 2024The radical, joyful follow-up to the Goldsmiths Prize-winning Sterling Karat Gold.This is the story of Corey Fah, a writer on the cusp of a windfall, courtesy of the Social Evils prize committee, for whom the actual gong - and with it the prize money - remains tantalizingly out of reach.Neon beige, with UFO-like qualities, the elusive trophy leads Corey, with partner Drew and surprise eight-legged companion Bambi Pavok, on a spectacular detour through their childhood in the Forest - via an unlikely stint on reality TV. Navigating those twin horrors, through wormholes and time loops, Corey learns - the hard way - the difference between a prize and a gift.Both radiant and revolutionary, Isabel Waidner's fiction gleefully takes a hammer to false binaries, boundaries and borders, turning walls into bridges and words into wings. Fierce, fluid and funny, they free us to imagine another way of being.This is a novel about coming into one's own, the labour of love, the tendency of history to repeat itself and the pitfalls of social mobility. It's about watching TV with your lover.'A head-spinning, mind-bending roller coaster of fun, horror, and subversion. I love it' Kamila Shamsie 'Reading Waidner is like plugging into an electric socket of language and ideas' Guardian

'A brilliant, strange and tender exploration of what it is to fail, keep failing, and fail better' Sarah Bernstein, author of Study for Obedience Two men meet in a flat in London. They are total strangers and yet they look remarkably alike. Lewis is grieving his dead wife; Korine is hiding from his very-much-alive one. Lewis never had children; Korine is an ambivalent parent at best. Lewis is an erstwhile actor, too depressed to attend the big audition that has just fallen into his lap. Korine has tried a dozen dead-end jobs but never pursued his acting dreams.Two men living mirror image lives. Each seeking a second chance to get things right. Each wanting what the other has.As If is an existential farce about the road not taken. Surreal and slyly poignant, suffused with ironic melancholia, it is a parable for the twenty-first century everyman: a character trapped in reality’s hall of mirrors, endlessly searching for something to live for.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD 2024LONGLISTED FOR THE NOTA BENE PRIZE 2024A radical, joyful novel from Goldsmiths Prize-winning author Isabel WaidnerIn flight from a traumatic rural childhood, Corey Fah has come to earth in a one-bed council flat in the capital. Trapped, with partner Drew, in the limited world which late capitalism has allotted them, they are modestly happy but practically futureless.Until, one day, Corey is offered a life-changing prize from out of the blue. Things are looking up – but as Corey soon finds, it’s one thing winning a prize in life’s lottery, and quite another being able to collect it – especially if you are a queer, working class immigrant with all of History working against you.Corey Fah’s pursuit of the elusive prize – and an escape from precarity – is a whirlwind, epic journey through the streets of the city and the time-loops of the past, written with boundless energy and invention.Social mobility, in this radiant, radical novel, is never a simple step up the ladder, but a hopeful leap into the void.Praise for Corey Fah Does Social Mobility:'A head-spinning, mind-bending roller coaster of fun, horror, and subversion' Kamila Shamsie'A radical, rebellious novel . . . [Waidner] brings a fresh lens to our troubled world' Observer[The] writer everyone is talking about . . . and deservedly so' Bernardine Evaristo'Filled with wickedly sharp commentary and well-aimed digs at hypocrisy and injustice' Times Literary Supplement

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD 2024LONGLISTED FOR THE NOTA BENE PRIZE 2024A radical, joyful novel from Goldsmiths Prize-winning author Isabel WaidnerIn flight from a traumatic rural childhood, Corey Fah has come to earth in a one-bed council flat in the capital. Trapped, with partner Drew, in the limited world which late capitalism has allotted them, they are modestly happy but practically futureless.Until, one day, Corey is offered a life-changing prize from out of the blue. Things are looking up – but as Corey soon finds, it’s one thing winning a prize in life’s lottery, and quite another being able to collect it – especially if you are a queer, working class immigrant with all of History working against you.Corey Fah’s pursuit of the elusive prize – and an escape from precarity – is a whirlwind, epic journey through the streets of the city and the time-loops of the past, written with boundless energy and invention.Social mobility, in this radiant, radical novel, is never a simple step up the ladder, but a hopeful leap into the void.Praise for Corey Fah Does Social Mobility:'A head-spinning, mind-bending roller coaster of fun, horror, and subversion' Kamila Shamsie'A radical, rebellious novel . . . [Waidner] brings a fresh lens to our troubled world' Observer[The] writer everyone is talking about . . . and deservedly so' Bernardine Evaristo'Filled with wickedly sharp commentary and well-aimed digs at hypocrisy and injustice' Times Literary Supplement

‘Dazzlingly clever, formally inventive and deeply moving. As If is a great success’ Times Literary SupplementTwo men meet in a flat in London. They are total strangers and yet they look remarkably alike. Lewis is grieving his dead wife; Korine is hiding from his very-much-alive one. Lewis never had children; Korine is an ambivalent parent at best. Lewis is an erstwhile actor, too depressed to attend the big audition that has just fallen into his lap. Korine has tried a dozen dead-end jobs but never pursued his acting dreams.Two men living mirror image lives. Each seeking a second chance to get things right. Each wanting what the other has.As If is an existential farce about the road not taken. Surreal and slyly poignant, suffused with ironic melancholia, it is a parable for the twenty-first century everyman: a character trapped in reality’s hall of mirrors, endlessly searching for something to live for.‘One of Britain's most exciting writers’ New Statesman‘A daring doppelganger puzzle’ Observer ‘A triumph of narrative voice’ Spectator

'A brilliant, strange and tender exploration of what it is to fail, keep failing, and fail better' Sarah Bernstein, author of Study for Obedience Two men meet in a flat in London. They are total strangers and yet they look remarkably alike. Lewis is grieving his dead wife; Korine is hiding from his very-much-alive one. Lewis never had children; Korine is an ambivalent parent at best. Lewis is an erstwhile actor, too depressed to attend the big audition that has just fallen into his lap. Korine has tried a dozen dead-end jobs but never pursued his acting dreams.Two men living mirror image lives. Each seeking a second chance to get things right. Each wanting what the other has.As If is an existential farce about the road not taken. Surreal and slyly poignant, suffused with ironic melancholia, it is a parable for the twenty-first century everyman: a character trapped in reality’s hall of mirrors, endlessly searching for something to live for.

Sterling is arrested one morning without having done anything wrong. Plunged into a terrifying and nonsensical world, Sterling – with the help of their three best friends – must defy bullfighters, football players and spaceships in order to exonerate themselves and to hold the powers that be to account.Sterling Karat Gold is Kafka’s The Trial written for the era of gaslighting – a surreal inquiry into the real effects of state violence on gender-nonconforming, working-class and black bodies.Following the Goldsmiths Prize–nominated We Are Made of Diamond Stuff, Isabel Waidner’s latest novel proposes community, inventiveness and the stubborn refusal to lie low as antidotes against marginalisation and towards fiercer futures.Praise:‘Ferocious and nebular, kind and strange—where strange means ‘queer, surprising’ and ‘outside of’—Sterling Karat Gold crackles on the edge of new language(s) while simultaneously demolishing language altogether. Narrator Sterling (think a nonbinary young Genet in foam spikes) is fomenting and canny, bent on surviving the mania of a rapidly morphing and out of control British regime. But what to lob against murderous nationalist illogics? Like all Waidner’s words, each verbal pulse is funneled velocity, gives no F’s, scraps for its place on the page, belongs, glitters. As much an elegy to the loss of mother tongues as mothers (also anticapitalist spaceships, friends, bodies, generations to AIDS, self), Waidner makes soft bombs of binaries, shows again and again how violence against bipoc, migrant, queer life is not fiction, and that liberation and alliance are inseparable. Sterling Karat Gold is fervid, focused, felt in all of its wholly radical clamor. The stakes? Our chest bones and tender communities inside. The mode? A Born-in-Flames-style reckoning that changes futures/leaves no one behind, ie, love.’ – Jess Arndt, author of Large Animals

Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Republic of Consciousness PrizePolar bears emerge from t-shirts. Reeboks come to life. Nothing is normal in the house of Mother Normal.In Isabel Waidner’s second novel, we follow an unnamed narrator who looks like Eleven from Stranger Things, but is in fact a 36-year-old migrant working for minimum wage in a run-down hotel on the Isle of Wight. Along with their best friend, Shae, the narrator faces Ukip activists, shapeshifting creatures, and despotic bosses while trying to hold down their job and preparing for their Life in the UK test.This is fiction that extends the avant-garde tradition beyond the upper-class experience that it usually chronicles – making it over as an ally of working-class queer experience. Set against a backdrop of austerity and decline, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff is an irreverent, boundary-erasing piece of work that celebrates the radical potential of resistance, ingenuity, and friendship.