Selby Wynn Schwartz: 'What if the centre of history were occupied by what women thought about?'
Selby Wynn Schwartz, author of After Sappho, talks about the influence of Virginia Woolf, writing in the first-person plural and reading ravenously
After Sappho was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. A joyous reimagining of the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers from the past, as they battle for control over their lives, for liberation and for justice.
Told in a series of cascading vignettes, featuring a multitude of voices, After Sappho hails the female torchbearers of the late 19th and early 20th century.
WHAT did we want? To begin with, we wanted what half the population had got by just being born.
Sarah Bernhardt - Colette - Eleanora Duse - Lina Poletti - Josephine Baker - Virginia Woolf… these are just a few of the women sharing the pages of a novel as fierce as it is luminous. Lush and poetic, furious and funny - in After Sappho, Selby Wynn Schwartz has created a work that celebrates the women and trailblazers of the past - and also offers hope for our present, and our futures.
Selby Wynn Schwartz
About the Author
Selby Wynn Schwartz was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. She is an award-winning writer, but with After Sappho she joins that select band of authors who have been longlisted for the Booker for their debut novel.A poetic patchwork of fragments of literary history that together take shape as an intergenerational tale of the Lesbian family. An ancestry eruditely, playfully recovered.
— The 2022 judges on After Sappho
