Rosalind Belben – författare

Shortlisted for the 2026 Republic of Consciousness Prize, US & CanadaIn the ‘middle of life’ – although this is only thirty-six – and with the unsparing eye of a portraitist, Lavinia reviews her frustrations and her solitariness, the grief and the rapture: these are her seeming companions in a pageant presided over, as it were, by the medieval masks of Owl, signifying winter, and Cuckoo, for erotic love. In attendance are dreams of rustic places and once-dear animals. But it is no ordinary procession, for her childhood comes last. The idiosyncratic Dreaming of Dead People was first published in 1979, yet remains as surprising as ever: it is frank, mordantly funny, true to itself and raw.

Philomena is requisitioned from a Dorset field in the summer of 1914, and serves with the yeomanry in Egypt and Palestine until the end of the First World War. But she doesn't come back to England: thousands of British Army horses are sold off locally. Faint news of her reaches Griselda Romney, her old owner. The impulsive Griselda, taking with her little Amabel and, of course, Nanny, sails for Egypt - to find Philomena and bring her home.

To George Lupus, Master of the Quarr Hounds, the fox is a 'gentleman'. The four children all hunt, and are tremendously keen. But Dorothy Lupus dislikes the sport that has been her beloved husband's passion. When a tragedy occurs, Dorothy finds she can't bear the proximity of the kennels across the park. Roguish, Rakish, Harebell, Arcady and Argot, Striver, Decorous, Fearless, Snowmaid... Dorothy wishes never to hear their hullabaloo again. She is adamant...

‘That the music may be polyphonic is no grounds for not listening,’ scribbles a man for his stone-deaf friend. In Is Beauty Good there are many such voices. People talk to various listeners, even to silent ones. They talk to themselves, they resort to handwriting. The inanimate too may be granted a whimsical presence: a child’s tricycle, an antique chest. But, witty and ironic, the novel speaks with one voice of the things that speak, and don't speak to us: ‘I drank carrot juice, beetroot juice. Disgusting. It seemed undignified, to be so desperate as to drink beetroot juice. Yet people do it without a second thought.’It begins in Berlin by the Wall. It ends in Berlin – still before 1989 – in the Tiergarten Zoo, to the boom and roar and moan of animals. More often we find ourselves in mountains or an English garden, in the natural world, the loss of which Is Beauty Good so memorably laments.