The Observer
10 best new novelists 2023 — Jacqueline Crooks & Jyoti Patel
Jacqueline Crooks
Jacqueline Crooks is 59 and was born in Jamaica but grew up in Southall, west London. Her first novel, Fire Rush, began life as entries in her diary and is essentially a fictional portrait of her early years. “It’s very much based on my experience of being a young woman in a male-dominated world. Experiencing oppression. Dancing with wonderful people. The dark side and the light side as well.”
The book – a bustling and lively story of black womanhood and dub music in the late 1970s – follows Yamaye and her friends as they frequent an underground club, the Crypt. There, she meets and falls in love with the charming Moose, but things quickly unravel. Yamaye then embarks on a life-changing journey across London, Bristol and Jamaica as she gets swept up in race riots, violence, revolution and retribution.
Although Fire Rush is her debut, Crooks has already published a short story collection, The Ice Migration, which was longlisted for the 2019 Orwell prize in the political fiction category. One of her tales, Silver Fish in the Midnight Sea, was shortlisted for the BBC national short story award the same year. Writing Fire Rush was more of a challenge than The Ice Migration, she admits. “I’m a very fast writer. When writing a novel, you have to slow down a lot. But I’m on novel number two now, so I understand the process a lot better.”
How long have you been working on Fire Rush?
This has taken me 16 years to write. It has gone through many transformations. Lots of edits and different workshops. I had to do the subject matter justice. It’s about black women, rage, oppression, sound revolution and police violence. I had to do a lot of research.
What were the early responses to the book?
I sent the first chapter out years ago to lots of publishers and agents. No one was interested, except for Bernardine Evaristo and Maggie Gee, who were editing Granta’s Anthology of New Writing: Volume 15. They published the first chapter. Then an agent approached me and I thought: This is it. It’s going to get published. But the agent dropped me because she wanted me to write less patois. It was the best thing that could have happened, because now I could write the book the way I wanted to. So I put more patois in it.
What musicians did you listen to during the writing process?
Lee “Scratch” Perry, Gregory Isaacs, Dennis Brown, Coxsone sound system.
What are some of your favourite books?
Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings; The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates; Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. I really enjoy Jacob Ross, Olive Senior and Leone Ross’s short stories.
What advice do you have for writers on finding their voice?
If you’re writing a book like this, which is really embedded in a culture, you’ve got to trust yourself. Trust the editors on structure, but when it comes to the voice, and the cultural nuance, you’ve got to be brave.
Jyoti Patel
Jyoti Patel’s first novel was a prize winner not only before it was published but also before it was fully written. The Things That We Lost won the Merky Books (the imprint created by Stormzy) New Writers’ prize in 2021 on the strength of its first chapter. Patel, 30, was working in digital marketing when she submitted her work for the prize, which awards a publishing contract to an unpublished writer from an under-represented background, aged 16-30. “There were a lot of tears, disbelief and a great deal of quiet pride. I really had to fight hard to study English at university,” says Patel, who found out she had won the prize during the pandemic. “I celebrated in lots of groups of six.”
Born in Paris to British Indian parents and raised in north-west London, she wrote the book because she grew up never seeing a story about a British Gujarati family living in London. It was a stop-start process: she wrote a rough draft in 2018, left it for six months, did a master’s in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, looked at the draft again and then paused for another six months. “Even [when I wasn’t writing], the characters were living with me. Once in a while, I’d think, ‘I wonder what they’re up to today.’”
At the centre of The Things That We Lost – a delicate and empathetic debut – is Nik, an 18-year-old who is struggling to navigate university life in a rural town, and his mother, Avani, who has long been grieving the tragic death of her husband, Elliot. When Nik’s grandfather dies, he is left a key that unlocks uncomfortable secrets about his father’s life and his family’s shame. The novel also jumps back in time to the 1980s and explores Avani and Elliot’s relationship and their experiences as a couple from Indian and white British backgrounds respectively. Essentially it’s a story about family secrets, love, belonging, diaspora and the way that immigrants perform their dual identity.
How did it feel to win the Merky prize?
When I was longlisted, I spoke to the commissioning editor at Merky and she said: “This is good. Keep writing.” That one conversation gave me so much faith in myself. It was the first time that a gatekeeper in the publishing industry, from a minority background, read my work and truly understood what I was trying to do. It’s really easy to be performative and to have a little scheme here and there, but Merky lives and breathes this idea of bringing different voices and untold stories to the mainstream. It feels so special to come into the world with my debut with them.
What is your writing routine?
I can’t write in the mornings. During the day, I collect lots of energy and thoughts and [by] the evening I know what I want to write. My whole day is a warm-up act.
What are some of your favourite debuts?
Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart and Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson. We’ve got a poet, a designer and a photographer. I always find that when you are a successful artist in another form, the pressure is off and that frees the writer to really bring their authentic self to the page. To not overthink or overcook.