arts + lit
WHM: women writers
Arts + Lit writers pay tribute to their favourite contemporary and historical female writers
W
Charly Cox
HEN we think of poetry our minds often cast back to GCSEs and the narrow, male dominated canon. Too often viewed as an outdated form of expression, poetry is in fact diverse and vital. Charly Cox first began sharing her poetry on Instagram. Her verses explore modern society from the perspective of a women in her early twenties, and as someone struggling with their mental health, captivated her followers. She Must Be Mad, her first collection published by HQ in 2018, explores coming of age. Divided into four sections: “she must be in love”, “she must be mad”, “she must be fat” and “she must be an adult”, her poetry addresses everything from her relationship with food (especially in her dedication to “Kale”) to her struggles with bipolar disorder, and dating in the age of social media. What makes Cox’s poetry stand out though is her honesty. Too often there are topics women shy away from discussing, both with female and male peers. Cox addresses these stereotyped cliché topics, and does so in a manner which brings forward the seriousness of them.
L
Lisa Taddeo
ISA Taddeo’s debut book, Three Women, is a fascinating piece of creative nonfiction. Setting three women’s intimate lives to prose, it is as searing as it is funny and relatable. The book is the fruits of an eight-year long labour during which Taddeo, who is also a journalist, talked to the three women whose lives are immortalised in the text about their sex lives and desires. Her close relationship with these women allowed her to get them to open up about details many of us wouldn’t even share with our best friend. The result is an incredible piece of work which debuted #1 on The New York Times’ bestseller list and is being scoped for a TV adaptation.
As someone with a mental illness, Cox’s poetry is comforting in that it represents the difficult, often strange, and sometimes funny, day-to-day reality of suffering with your mental health. These poems evolve with the reader too, with reactions developing from relatability to nostalgia. Overall, Cox’s writing is a valuable experience both for those suffering with their mental health and those who are lucky enough not to. By Katie Dunbar
Hanya Yanagihara
N important author you may not have heard of is Nella Larsen. She was an acclaimed American novelist, most famous for her two novels published in the 1920s, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929).
Image: Picador
I Image: Penguin
Image: Bloomsbury
Image: HQ Publishing
A
Nella Larsen
What is perhaps most remarkable about Lisa Taddeo is her sheer dedication to chasing stories. While researching Three Women not even the birth of her baby stopped her – she went to interviews and looked for potential subjects with a baby in a sling. She even moved to many different towns across America to spend time with and understand the lives of the women she was profiling. I love Lisa Taddeo’s work because it feels simultaneously like a revelation and something that has been living inside me my whole life. Her way with words – sometimes restrained, sometimes dripping with luxurious description – is enchanting. I’m looking forward to her debut fiction novel, Animal, a story of female rage, set to be published this summer. By Caitlin Barr
Believed to be of Afro-Caribbean and Danish immigrant descent, Larsen was a monumental figure in the Harlem Renaissance. This literary movement was an intellectual and cultural boom of African American literature, music, fashion, amongst others, based primarily in Harlem, New York City. Booming in the 20s and 30s, the Harlem Renaissance was seen as a rebirth of African culture that challenged racist stereotypes and racial segregation. Larsen has been lauded as the premier novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. She grew up living in a predominantly white neighbourhood and it was only when she was educated in a historically Black university that she lived within an African–American community for the first time. This feeling of constantly being out of place, as a result of her mixed heritage, has been widely documented, and is one of the hard-hitting focuses of her novels. By reading Nella Larsen’s works, you are not only stepping back into 1920s America, you are also stepping into the shoes of a woman struggling to find where she belongs. Larsen eloquently depicts the race and subsequent identity struggles felt by many in this time period, thus her work is a must-read. By Maddy Mckenna
F you were ever looking to experience every single emotion in one go, then read A Little Life. Nothing short of a literary masterpiece, this text is the most beautiful blend of love and tragedy I have ever experienced. But trust me, you do not want to read it on holiday because you’ll get a lot of dodgy looks sobbing by the pool. Written by Hanya Yanagihara in 2015 and nominated for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award, this gorgeously sad journey of love and loss and loss again is unbeatable and a landmark addition to queer fiction. Yanagihara herself is a testament to female authors. As a fourth-generation Hawaiian resident of Korean and Japanese descent, she has ruled the literary and journalistic world. As well as A Little Life, her first novel The People in the Trees was dubbed one of the best books of 2013. It is an intensely strong debut novel about the memoirs of a man in prison, again demonstrating her ability to interweave devastation into every plot point. After graduating Smith College in Northhampton, she moved to New York and entered the publishing business, then spent many years as an editor for Condé Nast Traveller. She then became editor-in-chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine where she still works. Boss by day and writer by night, she brings exceptionalism and charm to all of her work. I can only hope that her future books make me cry less!
By Olivia Garrett, Screen Editor
