![]() LOTE, her debut novel, won the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Memorial Prize. Von Reinhold is a Scottish-Nigerian writer. Originally published in the UK by Jacaranda as part of the Twenty in 2020 Black British writers series, LOTE won both the James Tait Black Prize and The Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2021. Through obsessive research on an overlooked Black modernist poet, the narrator buckles under the vacuousness of the art world and also curates a queer historical scene, breaking it open and reveling in it. Shola von Reinhold's lavish debut novel lays bare, through ornate, layered prose, the gaps and fault lines in the archive. The feeling of not only recognising, but of having been recognised. ![]() It tells the story of a queer Black thinker named Mathilda, in the present day, who is transfixed by an historical era that does not adequately represent her. ![]() Moonlight, of a kind, sighed up and down the tube of my spine, but above all, that indescribable note which accompanied all my Transfixions was present: humming beneath the high fine rush - probably not dissimilar to holy rapture - was an almost violent familiarity. To read Shola von Reinhold’s ornate, multi-layered novel LOTE (2020) is to encounter a baroque mind. This was confirmed by the sensations: flashes from Arcadia. What was beyond doubt by the time I got back was that a new Transfixion had arrived in the form of Hermia Druitt, the woman in this photograph. ![]()
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