Posted 7 May 2022
Where Have You Been?
Oh dear. I don't seem to have posted any news in this section for three years. Too many things have happened, but perhaps in due course I will add a few bits of old news before I get up-to-date with any new news*. In the meantime, you're probably better off going to my Instagram page. Yes, I finally succumbed. www.instagram.com/grahamrawle/ *New-news, or possibly nu-nus, sounds like one of those dreadful baby words that make me shudder. 'Theo darling, have you done you nu-nus?' |
Posted 1 Feb 2019
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Writer-in-Residence UWCSEA Singapore
No longer news, but I had a great time in Singapore last week where I was invited to the United World College of South East Asia to spend a week there as writer-in-residence. I gave lectures and held workshops mostly to students studying English, but also to film and graphic design students. It's an amazing school. Staff and students were wonderfully welcoming. |
Posted 19 Nov 2018
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Writing With Scissors: A Sideways Approach to Telling Stories.
I'll be giving a talk at De Grey Lecture Theatre, York St John University, 7.00pm - 8.30pm, Monday 26 November 2018. Organised by Drama York St John in association with The Laurence Sterne Trust at Shandy Hall. All welcome. More details here. |
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Posted 15 Oct 2018
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Review
OVERLAND - Graham Rawle Stuart Kelly, Times Literary Supplement, 27 July 2018 In Sheep's Clothing Graham Rawle has always been as much a designer as an author, and Overland is no different in this respect from Woman’s World (2005), his chrestomathy of quotations from women’s magazines, or The Card (2012), with its eloquent and eerie illustrations. This time around he has produced a novel written in landscape rather than portrait mode: the text is the wrong way round. More than that, the narrative is split across the pages, with the verso pages referring to the “Over” and the recto pages detailing the “Under”. There are asterisks that link moments in one part to haiku-like glances in the other. The “Under” concerns a Lockheed aviation factory during the Second World War, where Kay (a young woman passing herself off as Chinese despite her Japanese ancestry, following the internments after Pearl Harbor) and Queenie (a young woman who finds herself in a “situation” likely to imperil her ambitions to become an actress) are employed as welders. In the Over, Godfrey – known as God – has been tasked with camouflaging the entire factory. To that end, he has built a kind of utopia, using props from film studios. It is a place of picket fences and picnics, where the dogs are all taxidermy and his loyal assistant Jimmy moves around the fake sheep to maintain the artifice for the Japanese spy planes overhead. Of course, Kay and Queenie manage to breach the Over. It does not end well for anyone, and yet there is a strangely redemptive quality to the book. Godfrey thinks he has seen a mermaid in his man-made lake. Queenie thinks she will be more than just an extra in a lifelong film. Kay has to camouflage herself. Jimmy will have to jump. Postmodern fiction is often less concerned with the willing suspension of disbelief than with the idea of the perfect illusion. Works such as Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1899), Jorge Luis Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science” (1946), Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel (1946), the television series Westworld and film The Truman Show (1998) have all explored the idea of a simulacrum so precise as to be indistinguishable from the real. The most moving parts of Rawle’s novel are those in which Godfrey moves from Over to Under and tries to identify the gaps between the constructed and the actual. Queenie’s obsession with film forms a dark mirror to this hiatus. Parts of Overland are reminiscent of Philip K. Dick – not so much The Man in the High Castle (1962), though the passages on Japanese concentration camps are subtle, sophisticated and sympathetic – but Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), with its interest in what might be considered human and what a clever automaton. (The fake sheep may be a wink to this.) Godfrey has devised a place where “people only ever saw the good in you”, and yet, as Queenie realizes, “I’m acting all the time”. Speaking to another resident of the Overland, she asks, “Oh, so you’re part of the crew? Or do you mean you’re playing the part of a carpenter?” “It’s the same thing, isn’t it” is the chilling response. This is a beautiful book, not just in terms of its design, but in its moral integrity. A lesser writer would have made it all satire, and yet here there is much humanity and empathy. It takes Graham Rawle several years to compose his books; they are wholly worth the wait. |
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Posted 26 July 2018
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PORT ELIOT FESTIVAL 2018 Tomorrow (Friday July 27th) I'll be talking about OVERLAND and my other books in a one hour talk entitled VISUAL STORYTELLING at the Port Eliot Festival in St Germans, Cornwall. I'll be in the Walled Garden and my talk begins at 2.15pm. Oh, and there are some other things going on at the festival too. Everything you could wish to know can be found here. |
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Posted 6 May 2018
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OVERLAND by Graham Rawle review - the illusion of home
Nice, perceptive review by Xan Brooks will appear this Saturday in the Guardian. Read now online. |
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Posted 5 March 2018
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Big piece by Peter Sheridan in last Monday's Daily Express about OVERLAND and the wartime camouflage of the Burbank Lockheed factory. Read it here.
Posted 5 March 2018
Very nice OVERLAND review by the great Lee Randall. Read it here.
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