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Wiz Wharton

@wizwharton

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Author. Ghost Girl, Banana @hodderbooks (UK) & @harperviabooks (US) TV series in progress.
📚 @cmlwilson @rcwliteraryagency
🎬 @emilyhaywardwhitlock

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Nothing like the angst of being on double sub.

I need to get myself a Hemingway ❤️

#loveletters
#writerslife by @wizwharton

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25 days ago

by @wizwharton

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a month ago

My favourite book on this year's @bookerprize longlist by a country mile (with Marlon James's THE DISAPPEARERS still to read).

I agree with other commentators who say that it's best to go into SWITZY by @emmanancycline knowing as little as possible about it. But trust me when I say this one lingers. Indisputably one of the most affecting, impressive novels I have read for at least a decade. Possibly ever.

Having said that, it won't be for everyone especially if, like me, you have lived experience of its subject matter. Yet even as its tonality is bleak, it resists its maudlin temptation to instead become a meditation on the ultimate leveller that is mortality. At times, it reminded me of Austin Wright's brilliant TONY AND SUSAN (specifically its outer narrative rather than its meta-fictive content) in terms of how it renders both the impossibility of changing the past with the suspended anticipation of a future we may be less in control of than imagined. The definition of a good life may be what remains at the end, cognitive decline notwithstanding.

The best fiction seems effortless to readers, but the skill it takes to construct a (frankly) unlikeable protagonist and gift his impossible situation dignity rather than sentimentality is a measure of Cline's mesmerising control and nimbleness as an author. Forensic at the sentence level, Switzy falls and rises like the musical motifs her character consistently returns to until its last devastating pages.

Calling it now. This book is a masterpiece. All. The. Stars.

And if it doesn't make the Booker shortlist announcement today, I might just have an existentialist crisis of my own.

#BookerPrize2026
#EmmaCline
#Switzy
#notablefiction by @wizwharton

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a month ago

Best autumn days with my gorgeous sister @mangelatheone @inthebotanics by @wizwharton

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a month ago

Editor in chief:
One thought per sometimes....

#dogsofinstagram
#longdog
#dognose by @wizwharton

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2 months ago

“We wake up to tomorrow, never yesterday.”

I'm a huge fan of novels that play with the concept of time and memory — Francis Spufford's LIGHT PERPETUAL, Murial Sparks' THE DRIVER'S SEAT, and David Vann's LEGEND OF A SUICIDE come to mind — so I was thrilled to be sent a copy of Chloe Benjamin's UNDERSTORY which promises to utilise similar narrative collages, melding the speculative and environmental with shades of the Odysseus myth.

** From the publisher:
At the end of the world, biologist Laurel Salter is hiding from everything she’s ever known. For ten hours a day, six days per week, she works as a dishwasher at McMurdo Station, an isolated research base in Antarctica. She tells no one that before she arrived, she was a renowned young scientist with a promising career, a husband, and a family.

But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can’t outrun her past. When a strange light appears across the ice—and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo—her former husband, Eli, won't be far behind.

Laurel is captivated by the Arc: its surreal glow; the way it seems almost alive. And though Eli is reluctant to test her wildest theory, Laurel is convinced that the Arc leads down a rabbit hole, and into a world they can barely imagine. Can she persuade him to risk everything to fix the burden that hangs between them—to turn back the clock and live their story a second time?**

Cannot wait to get stuck into this one. And, at the risk of seeming shallow, can we just appreciate that ridiculously gorgeous cover for a moment? My sincere thanks to @mary_anne135 @tinder_press for generously gifting me a copy 💫

#Understory
#bookpost
#speculativefiction by @wizwharton

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2 months ago

I am delighted and immeasurably grateful to have been awarded a very generous Foundation Grant from @thesocietyofauthors in order to continue my writer's practice.

If you are a member of the society and either previously published in the UK or Ireland OR have been commissioned to write a full length work for the same, it's well worth checking out their criteria here:
https://societyofauthors.org/grants/authors-foundation/

In an unprecedentedly tough market for literary fiction, it's incredible to have both the support and the validation to keep going. 🎉🔥

#SoAGrants
#WritersLife
#Iamwriting by @wizwharton

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2 months ago

Well, this looks utterly excellent 🔥

Inspired by the real life Hawaii false ballistic missile alert in 2018, Vincent Yu's debut asks what we would do should the unthinkable happen, and how we live with the consequences of the second chances we never expected to receive.

Thanks so much to Amie Jones @duck_books for thinking of me and sending! I can't wait to read. 🎉 by @wizwharton

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Been struggling with the news coverage this past week, as I know many of you have.

And Trevor Phillips @thetimes, and every other bin fire dishrag journalist who purports to be reporting in the "public interest", you will NEVER speak for me.

BTW, quietly editing your initial article after Professor Arday's death, like the cowards you are, didn't work. The internet has receipts.

Hug the ones you love, guys.

With thanks to @jolyon_maugham for the screenshot. by @wizwharton

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2 months ago

The Part 2 that no one asked for...👏

Some more greats from the oeuvre of south east Asian cinema. Parasite was totally meant to make the first cut - probably in my top twenty films of all time, origin notwithstanding 🔥

Hugest thanks to those who've connected with these, including @harrietwaterhouse.actor @mswolfwriter and @evawongnava who brilliantly jogged my memory on some omissions ❤️

#southeastasiancinema
#screenwriting
#film by @wizwharton

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2 months ago

I've made most of my Instagram connections through my work as a novelist. Few probably realize that I actually started my career as a screenwriter, training at the National Film and Television School (NFTS) under Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh and Kenith Trodd, as well as the great Jan Fleischer.

Having recently returned to that role - adapting my debut novel Ghost Girl, Banana (and very much hoping to do the same with my second book!) - I thought it would be nice to include some TV and Film inspirations to the grid.

Having grown up with a Chinese mum who lived for Asian cinema, here are a few of my favourite offerings from that continent. Some will be familiar to you because of their breakout into the Western mainstream/awards circuit; others might yet be wonderful gems for you to discover.

Let me know which ones you've seen and which ones you'd add to the list. 📽️📽️📽️

#screenwriting
#asiancinema by @wizwharton

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2 months ago

If there's one thing that Friday's devastating denouement has proven, it's that people of colour are still held to the most impossible of standards, a metric under which they are constantly scrutinized and forced to answer to in disproportion to others. They will be judged, diagnosed and prematurely condemned by bad faith actors who believe that equality equals oppression.

My argument is not against scrutiny. It's about the ruthless dismantling and vilification of a fellow human being unfairly used as a lightning rod in a larger cultural agenda.

RIP Professor Jason Arday. by @wizwharton

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