Today I want to remember my rabbits, Lavender (white rabbit), and Anya, or Lav Lav and AnAn as I tended to call them. Mini lops with another breed in their heritage (AnAn was a one up, one down lop).

Both rabbits spent the majority of their lives with chronic illnesses, becoming ill in the first months of lockdown. They were diagnosed with Arthritis at only 2 years old and in the months after Lavender passed away from a tumour or abscess in his liver, Anya was diagnosed with stomach spasms, painful occurrences that were random; Lavender likely had it also.

It wasn’t the happiest life. While we did the best we could for them and they were often very joyful, their combined illnesses meant that we were very often at the vets for emergency visits all hours of the day and night. At our best we had a break of 6 months. At our worst we were going every 2 weeks. Lavender was very hard of hearing and relied on his sister for a lot, including moral support and cuddles. He more often than not dealt with bad stuff by becoming depressed. AnAn was much more protective, the vets would get one of us to take her out of the carrier – she’d bitten most of them by the end – and reacted to vet visits with trauma.

But there was great joy as well. They were funny, they were cute, they binkied and zoomied a lot. One of my favourite memories is when I was trying to coax Lavender to come out of the pen one day and suddenly from behind, his sister comes flying past, obviously bored of waiting. Another is of Anya as a baby, a few weeks old, hissing at me because she didn’t want me to pick her up to take her back to their hutch. She looked like a cute tiny dragon, not the menacing beast she wanted to appear to be. Lavender would tell me repeatedly when I left the meshed shed window open in summer. AnAn loved to listen to me read aloud – her favourite book was Sarah Marsh’s A Sign Of Her Own with all its phonetics and beautiful writing. She hated Pride And Prejudice, too much dialogue that made her human mother too animated. In her last week I brought Sarah Marsh’s book downstairs to read the first chapter yet again and as soon as I started she ran over for a cuddle.

They had three homes within ours – a hutch, a purpose-built shed, and finally, once diagnosed with Arthritis, our living room. The shed in particular was a good choice – there was a storm the first night they stayed in it and in that storm their double-bolted hutch fell over.

Lavender loved going back in his shed after a day in the run. Anya meanwhile played ‘yes I will, no I won’t’ for at least at hour every evening – I’d tap the litter tray and Lavender would jump straight in for easy transport back to his house, but Anya would jump in and jump out again, even if it was pouring with rain and even after I’d ignore her for 10 minutes at a time to try and given her a fear of missing out. Lavender couldn’t stand any dampness at all. They were born at the very start of the heatwave of 2018 when there wasn’t any rain fall between May and September. The first day of rain was a huge surprise.

The past 6 years and 6 months – the time I had them over all – have been incredibly difficult. Since AnAn died a few days ago, a huge weight has lifted from me. I lived my life in utter stress and paranoia due to how often they got ill and how subtle the signs could be. I loved my rabbits to distraction. I also will never have rabbits again.

I do want to say that rabbits are the best pets I’ve ever had. They are extremely smart, have long memories, aren’t afraid to tell you to get lost if they are bored of you or if you’re doing something that isn’t in their routine (routine is very important – I decided to stay up and watch TV one night and got thumped at until I left the room), and they are very loving. Anya in particular was also very polite – she would thank me for cuddles by bopping me with her nose, she’d thank the water bowl for her drink the same way, she’d even say hello to the dustpan and brush I used to sweep up hay and food crumbs.

However they get ill very easily; their bodies have favoured breeding above anything else. If you’re lucky you’ll have a rabbit that needs a couple of emergency visits over a lifespan of about 12 years. If you’re unlucky… well, my story is above.

I wanted to write all of the above today as one post – the memories, the good, the bad. Given the amount of care I needed to give them, I feel I’ve lost children; they were my first priority always and I lost a lot of sleep over them.

Goodbye my AnAn, the beautiful girl who the vets had seen so much they also cried when she died despite all the biting. (She died of a freak stomach or liver torsion, we didn’t want to do surgery to find out which.) And goodbye again my Lav Lav, who we last saw in good health on Christmas Day.

Lavender Lazuli Place: 10th May 2018 – 29th December 2023
Anya Kuai Le Place: 10th May 2018 – 14th November 2024

I’m incredibly happy to be posting this – the winner of the Young Writer of the Year Award (now in its 30th anniversary year) will be announced this Thursday, 24th of February at the London Library. Happy because when I checked late last year at the usual time and noted there was nothing on the website about the 2021 award, I wondered if it had been paused; I’m delighted that it has not been, and happy to hear that the dates have simply been changed. It is one of the best awards out there and the winners are always well-deserved.

This year there are five writers on the shortlist, the same number as last year (previously it has been four). There are three novels, one non-fiction, and one poetry collection. The shortlist is diverse and four of the writers are women. In alphabetical order by surname we have:

Anna Beecher for her novel, Here Comes The Miracle:

It begins with a miracle: a baby born too small and too early, but defiantly alive. This is Joe.

Decades before, another miracle. In a patch of nettle-infested wilderness, a seventeen year old boy falls in love with his best friend, Jack. This is Edward.

Joe gains a sister, Emily. From the outset, her life is framed by his. She watches him grow into a young man who plays the violin magnificently and longs for a boyfriend. A young man who is ready to begin.

Edward, after being separated from Jack, builds a life with Eleanor. They start a family and he finds himself a grandfather to Joe and Emily.

When Joe is diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, Emily and the rest of the family are left waiting for a miracle. A miracle that won’t come.

Here Comes the Miracle is a profoundly beautiful story about love and loss; and about the beautiful and violent randomness of life.

Cal Flyn for her work of non-fiction, Islands Of Abandonment:

This is a book about abandoned places: ghost towns and exclusion zones, no man’s lands and fortress islands – and what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place.

In Chernobyl, following the nuclear disaster, only a handful of people returned to their dangerously irradiated homes. On an uninhabited Scottish island, feral cattle live entirely wild. In Detroit, once America’s fourth-largest city, entire streets of houses are falling in on themselves, looters slipping through otherwise silent neighbourhoods.

This book explores the extraordinary places where humans no longer live – or survive in tiny, precarious numbers – to give us a possible glimpse of what happens when mankind’s impact on nature is forced to stop. From Tanzanian mountains to the volcanic Caribbean, the forbidden areas of France to the mining regions of Scotland, Flyn brings together some of the most desolate, eerie, ravaged and polluted areas in the world – and shows how, against all odds, they offer our best opportunities for environmental recovery.

By turns haunted and hopeful, this luminously written world study is pinned together with profound insight and new ecological discoveries that together map an answer to the big questions: what happens after we’re gone, and how far can our damage to nature be undone?

Rachel Long for her poetry collection, My Darling From The Lions:

Rachel Long’s much-anticipated debut collection of poems, My Darling from the Lions, announces the arrival of a thrilling new presence in poetry.

Each poem has a vivid story to tell – of family quirks, the perils of dating, the grip of religion or sexual awakening – stories that are, by turn, emotionally insightful, politically conscious, wise, funny and outrageous.

Long reveals herself as a razor-sharp and original voice on the issues of sexual politics and cultural inheritance that polarize our current moment. But it’s her refreshing commitment to the power of the individual poem that will leave the reader turning each page in eager anticipation: here is an immediate, wide-awake poetry that entertains royally, without sacrificing a note of its urgency or remarkable skill.

Caleb Azumah Nelson for his novel, Open Water:

Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists – he a photographer, she a dancer – trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.

At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential British debut of recent years.

Megan Nolan for her novel, Acts Of Desperation:

Discover this bitingly honest, darkly funny debut novel about a toxic relationship and secret female desire, from an emerging star of Irish literature.

She’s twenty-three and in love with love. He’s older, and the most beautiful man she’s ever seen. The affair is quickly consuming.

But this relationship is unpredictable, and behind his perfect looks is a mean streak. She’s intent on winning him over, but neither is living up to the other’s ideals. He keeps emailing his thin, glamorous ex, and she’s starting to give in to secret, shameful cravings of her own. The search for a fix is frantic, and taking a dangerous turn…

The judges, alongside The Sunday Times Literary Editor, Andrew Holgate, are Sarah Moss, Andrew O’Hagan, Tahmima Anam, Gonzalo C Garcia, and Claire Lowdon.

This year, Waterstones is involved. The bookstore has been celebrating the shortlist (and will be celebrating the winner) with special content on its various social media channels.

In past years I’ve had suspicions of who might win based on reading the work and being more involved; I have no idea this time, but poetry does very well in this award so if Rachel Long’s work is anything like the standard of Sarah Howe, Jay Bernard, and Raymond Antrobus (and it’s likely to be so), I’d say there’s a good chance she will win.

Regardless of who wins, it’s exciting and yes, I do plan to review at least a couple of these!

The time of what I consider a big highlight of the literary year has begun, albeit quite different this time as is everything else. The shortlist for the 2020 Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award was announced on Sunday, and it looks pretty stellar. Here is the announcement by Andrew Holgate, Literary Editor of The Sunday Times (email subscribers, you’ll likely have to open this post in your browser using the link at the bottom of this email in order to view the video):

Most years there are 4 shortlisted authors; like the judges in 2017, the judges this year have chosen 5 authors they believe to be the best contenders, spanning the realms of poetry, non-fiction, and novel. Of the five, two are poetry collections, which is unusual (and pretty awesome). So, the writers are:

Jay Bernard for the poetry collection Surge (Chatto & Windus)
Catherine Cho for the memoir Inferno (Bloomsbury)
Naoise Dolan for the novel Exciting Times (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Seán Hewitt for the poetry collection Tongues Of Fire (Jonathan Cape)
Marina Kemp for the novel Nightingale (4th Estate)

This year’s judges are Sebastian Faulks, Tessa Hadley, Kit de Waal, and Houman Barekat. Tessa Hadley said that “The books stand out because they’re so well written, with important things to say – and the wonderful thing is that they have nothing in common apart from that.” Kit de Waal points to the authors “demonstrating a range of technical ability, outlook and style”, and Sebastian Faulks notes that “They have absorbed the lessons of those who have gone before them; but their own books all seem urgent and modern”.

The winner will receive £5,000 and offered a ten week residency by the University of Warwick. The London Library, in normal times the host of the winner’s ceremony, has added a year’s membership to these offerings.

As mentioned by Andrew Holgate in the video, extracts from the books will be in Granta magazine over this week. The first, comprised of two poems from Surge, is now online.

A digital winners ceremony will be held on Thursday 10th December.

Charlie and Roselle Lim (Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune; Vanessa Yu’s Magical Paris Tea Shop) discuss weaving culture, mental illness, and magic into your fiction, an aid for your eyes when chopping onions, and children you excitedly take to tourist attractions who wonder what you see in them.

Fresh Fiction’s review of Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune, as quoted

Release details: recorded 9th June 2020; published 22nd June 2020

Roselle’s social media: Twitter || Instagram || Website

Go back to the list of episodes

Show notes:

Question Index
Book Purchasing Links
Photo Credit Line

Question Index

02:03 Tell us about your writing background
03:45 Is Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune one big metaphor?
05:27 You have a particular love of words?…
06:09 Was Natalie always planned to be unsure of herself?
06:53 How did your relationship with your own mother influence the novel?
07:51 What’s your favourite meal to make?
08:55 Have you had experience yourself of food solving, or helping to solve, a problem?
11:16 What was behind the decision to incorporate recipes into the narrative?
12:37 Does chewing mint gum help when chopping onions?
13:14 Was the thread about outsiders, trying to disrupt for their own gain, based on a particular event?
14:09 Introduce us to San Francisco’s Chinatown
15:24 Do you love classical music?
16:12 Was the romance between Natalie and Daniel always in the book?
17:26 How much was filial piety in your mind when writing?
18:53 Is Vanessa Yu Miss Yu from Natalie Tan?
19:20 (We discuss Paris and London – Roselle went there to research Vanessa Yu’s Magical Paris Tea Shop)
25:28 Did you ever wonder about using a different name to Natalie, given that that is your daughter’s name?
32:25 Vanessa Yu – is it fair to say this is a very different book to Natalie Tan?
33:09 Are you writing your next book?
33:35 Natalie Tan has been optioned for a TV show…

Purchasing Links

Natalie Tan’s Book of Love and Fortune Amazon UK Amazon US Amazon Canada Waterstones Hive Barnes & Noble IndieBound Indigo Chapters

Vanessa Yu’s Magical Paris Tea Shop Amazon UK Amazon US Amazon Canada Barnes & Noble IndieBound Indigo Chapters

I am an Amazon Associate and earn a small commission on qualifying purchases.

Photograph used with permission from the author. Credit: Shelley Smith

…Official because I know I’ve been away anyway.

Brief details: sick rabbit now better but he and his sister were mistakenly separated by the vet. Separating bonded rabbits is not something you’re supposed to do; I now have two very sad, single rabbits, who desperately want to be together but whose species instincts mean they can’t just be put back together because they will fight. They need to be reintroduced slowly, effectively have very short playdates for the next few weeks. This all kicked off last Monday – hence my last post was that day as it had been written at the weekend – and is taking a lot of my time and energy.

I have a podcast episode online this coming Monday which I will post here, but besides that I will be back to blogging on Monday 6th July.

Thank you for baring with me and I hope you are all okay.