Mailing List


Leon Craig
Leon Craig is a writer and editor based in Berlin. She has written for the TLS, the Literary ReviewAnother Gaze and the London Magazine among others. Her queer gothic short story collection Parallel Hells is published by Sceptre Books and she is currently working on her first novel The Decadence.

Articles Available Online


Cosy Violence

Book Review

June 2023

Leon Craig

Book Review

June 2023

The 22 year old Australian narrator of K Patrick’s sensuous, subversive debut novel is a long way from home. A matron at an unnamed...

Fiction

September 2021

Lick the Dust

Leon Craig

Fiction

September 2021

When you misplace something in the library here, it stays lost for a very long time. The eighteenth-century catalogue...

In 1999, living in France for the first time, I picked up a copy of Passion simple by Annie Ernaux at the Fnac My French wasn’t great, but the vocabulary was simple, as was the subject: one woman’s obsession with her Russian lover ‘From September last year,’ she writes, ‘I did nothing else but wait for a man: for him to call me and come round to my place’ Entire days slip by in this heightened state: the cycle of waiting, then finally hearing from him, or seeing him, then the emptiness again, followed by the immediate hunger to repeat the experience It taught me so much about the unfulfilment of fulfilment I loved how spare and almost unemotional the prose was, all while evoking this most emotion-ridden of experiences, and in time, reading her other work, I would come to understand that this écriture plate, or flat writing, was one of its strongest, most unique attributes From books like La place (A Man’s Place, 1983, for which she won France’s prestigious Prix Renaudot) or Une femme (A Woman’s Story, 1988), about the deaths, respectively, of Ernaux’s father and mother, to Les Années (2008), recently published in English, translated by Alison L Strayer, as The Years, Ernaux demonstrates a striking ability to take the most wrenching of experiences and render them unflinchingly, without moral judgment   Ernaux was born in 1940 in Normandy to a working-class family; her parents worked in a factory and later ran a small café and shop This background informs all of Ernaux’s work, from her early anti-novels Les Armoires vides (Cleaned Out, 1974) and Ce qu’ils disent ou rien (1977) to her later masterpieces L’événement (Happening, 2000), about an illegal abortion, or Mémoire de fille (2016), which takes place during the summer of 1958, when she worked as a counsellor at a summer camp in Normandy, and explores the shame she felt following her first sexual experience with another counsellor there [1] Elizabeth Bowen once described herself as a writer ‘for whom places loomed large’; this is also true of Ernaux, for whom the past is a

Contributor

April 2016

Leon Craig

Contributor

April 2016

Leon Craig is a writer and editor based in Berlin. She has written for the TLS, the Literary Review, Another Gaze and the London Magazine among...

Art Review

April 2019

Oscar Wilde Temple, Studio Voltaire

Leon Craig

Art Review

April 2019

The light is dim, the air richly scented. Little purple tea lights flicker in the votive candle rack and...

[Getting] Down with Gal Pals

Feature

November 2018

Leon Craig

Feature

November 2018

There’s a moment in Laura Kaye’s underrated novel English Animals when the protagonist Mirka, sitting in the village bar with her married lover, notices...
Mute Canticle

Prize Entry

April 2016

Leon Craig

Prize Entry

April 2016

Giulio the singing fascist came to pick me up from the little airport in his Jeep. He made sure to come round and hold...

READ NEXT

feature

May 2014

The Quick Time Event

David Auerbach

feature

May 2014

The ability of computers to semantically understand the world – and the humans in it – is next to...

feature

June 2015

Uneasy Lies the Head

William Watkin

feature

June 2015

Last October I was standing in my kitchen, waiting for espresso to trickle from the spout of our imposing...

poetry

November 2013

Shine On You Crazy Diamond

George Szirtes

poetry

November 2013

And so they shone, every one of them, each crazy, everyone a diamond shining the way things shine, each...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required