Anakana Schofield (Pic by Arabella Campbell)

Writing Rights – Spotlight on Anakana Schofield

Last Thursday, we partnered with The Irish Times on the ‘Writing Rights’ project to mark Human Rights Day 2015.  Seven highly acclaimed Irish authors participated in the project, creating written responses – ranging from poetry to creative fiction to factual pieces – to various articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This week, we’re shining a spotlight on each of the authors that participated in ‘Writing Rights’.  Today, it’s the turn of Anakana Schofield, whose contribution to ‘Writing Rights’ was a piece of original writing called ‘5 X 5 Rooms – 5 Micro-Fictions on Article 5’.

The article from which Anakana drew her inspiration – Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – states: ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’.  Her piece is comprised of five vignettes, evoking the experiences of an asylum-seeker, people living in desperate housing conditions, and a victim of sexual abuse.

Anakana is an Irish-Canadian writer, who won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and the Debut-Litzer Prize for Fiction for her debut novel, ‘Malarky’.

Delivering the jury citation when Anakana won the First Novel award, Stuart Woods hailed ‘Malarky’ as “a bold first novel from an author whose prose hums with electric wit and linguistic daring. The novel traverses darkly comic territory with intelligence and poise, relating the story of an unnamed narrator whose resilience in the face of life’s disappointments will stay with readers long after the verbal pyrotechnics have dissipated. Anakana Schofield is a true original, and her novel is a delight.”

Anakana’s second novel, ‘Martin John’, will be published in February 2016 by And Other Stories.  the novel was recently shortlisted for the Giller Prize (Canada’s Booker Prize).  Further information about ‘Martin John’ is available here, while you can find out more about Anakana’s work at: www.anakanaschofield.com.

You can read ‘5 X 5 Rooms – 5 Micro-Fictions on Article 5’ here.