‘A strange, rich and often dazzling collection’ – 2022 SoA Awards shortlists announced

This year’s awards are a showcase of the written word across all genres and formats, celebrating novels, children’s books and short stories, and exploring themes from race and social injustice, to coming of age, loneliness, grief and reconciliation.

Among the 32 shortlisted works is Arts Council of Northern Ireland ACES awardee Sheila Llewellyn’s book, Winter in Tabriz (Sceptre, Hodder & Stoughton), which has been shortlisted for the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize.

The Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize judge Caroline Brothers said:

“The shortlist for the inaugural Volcano Prize represents some of the most adventurous works of contemporary fiction, each grappling in different ways with the forces that are shaping the modern world... In their journeys away from home, these novels stood out for their sophisticated understanding of people, places and history, for their courage in exploring complexity and the search for meaning, for the way they harnessed the power of language to help us see the world with fresh eyes.”

Author Sheila Llewellyn, former Arts Council awardee said:

“I'm so pleased to have been shortlisted, I have a lot of respect for the Society of Authors and the work they do to encourage writers and writing. And I'm particularly pleased and grateful that the judges must have connected with the novel and found something worthy in it, which is as much as a writer can hope for.”

Congratulating Sheila on the award, Damian Smyth, Head of Literature at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland said:

“Sheila Llewellyn’s second novel Winter in Tabriz has been rightly saluted with this prestigious shortlisting. A magisterial and moving imagining of Iran in the revolutionary period of the late 1970s, it surprises and exhilarates with the drama of love and repression among young people embroiled where extraordinary world events and private lives collide. What a book. It continues her compassion for people under the pressure of circumstance, commitment and suffering which marked her debut Walking Wounded. Congratulations to ACES awardee Sheila and Sceptre, Hodder & Stoughton from all at Arts Council NI.”

Winter in Tabriz is the story of two men caught in the 1979 Iranian revolution. Damian, a university lecturer, originally from Northern Ireland, and Arash, an Iranian poet from Tabriz, meet each other at Berkeley, California. Damian follows Arash to Tabriz to live with him, but their relationship is tested as the chaos of pre-revolutionary Iran takes hold. Arash becomes one of ‘the disappeared’, and much of the novel explores Damian’s attempts to come to terms with the grief, and the ‘not knowing’ endured by the loved ones of those who are disappeared.

The Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize is awarded to a UK or Irish writer, or a writer currently resident in those countries, for a novel focusing on the experience of travel away from home. In memory of Malcolm Lowry and endowed by Gordon Bowker, his biographer, and Ramdei Bowker.

The winners will be announced on the 1 June 2022 at an in-venue ceremony at Southwark Cathedral, which will also be livestreamed.