Fiona Mozley
Fiona Mozley is an English novelist and medievalist. Her debut contemporary novel Elmet was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and received a number of further accolades.
Early life and education
Fiona Mozley was born in 1988 in the London Borough of Hackney, and grew up in York, where she attended Fulford School. After graduating from King's College, Cambridge, Mozley lived in Honor Oak and briefly taught English in Buenos Aires before moving back to York in 2013 for her Master of Arts. As of 2017, she was in the midst of her PhD thesis at the University of York on the concept of decay in the Late Middle Ages. She also works part-time in a bookshop.Career
Mozley sees as York's most significant literature its Mystery Plays. These along with local drama groups she views "as having influenced my own writing more significantly than any books I have read." When asked at an earlier interview about writers and works she particularly enjoyed, she mentioned some by Cormac McCarthy and Ursula K. Le Guin, and by Philip Pullman, whom she had loved as a child. Mozley's novel Elmet appeared in the 2018 Irish Leaving Certificate English examination.Mozley was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.
Works
The name "Elmet" is taken from a Celtic kingdom that once covered West Yorkshire. In the novel, Mozley "wanted to capture the ambiguity of local historical recollections; to say something about their double-edged thrall; to examine the desire to live in the past and the need to extricate oneself from it."The novel Elmet is concerned strongly with the idea of home, "the building of a house, the preparation of food; stolen glimpses of a woman's wardrobe." This moves stealthily onto the fact that the 14-year-old narrator, Daniel, is not just domesticated, but must come to terms with being gay, or even transgender, while his older sister Cathy is a tomboy "raised in isolation by a man poorly suited to the job, and taught skills typically taken up by boys." "Daddy" is kind to his two children, but otherwise known to be violent. The father's concern is for the land: "the wilderness tamed by man's benevolent but dictatorial hand... provides fertile ground for the evil that men do." The front cover of the novel was illustrated by Vanessa Lubach using a multilayered linocut.
Mozley's second novel titled Hot Stew was published in 2021. Writing for The Guardian, Alex Preston praised the work and said it confirmed the author was "a writer of extraordinary empathic gifts".