On Friday the 23rd of August, Canadian author Camilla Grudova appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF) in conversation with Eris Young to talk about her latest book The Coiled Serpent, longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2024. This short story collection dabbles in the emerging genre of ‘new weird’ which was a central discussion point during the talk, as this is one author who is not afraid to explore the darkest and most outrageous underbellies of humanity in her work.
Grudova talks about how her environment often informs the fiction she writes. She mentions how her time living in Toronto helped shape her first published collection The Doll’s Alphabet (2017) and her debut novel Children of Paradise (2022), while The Coiled Serpent is her first book that is entirely centralized around her experiences living in the United Kingdom. With this in mind, it was fitting that she opened the discussion by reading an excerpt from her story “The Custard Factory” that was inspired by a true event when a custard factory exploded in Banbury in 1981.
As she describes in intricate detail the thick yellow substances flowing down the streets following the accident and a small child choking on human teeth and fingernails after eating it, Young steers the conversation onto the ways that Grudova confronts her readers with “shocking” and “grotesque” imagery. Grudova responds by inviting a consideration of class divisions in her audience range, as she says a reader who has experience working in hospitality, such as a waitress or as a cleaner, who deals regularly with the bodily fluids of strangers, may not find this content shocking at all. She highlights that it is the reader who has never been in a position where they have had to deal with the messes of others who would find these descriptions so offensive and absurd–and for this, she is grateful for her past experiences working in similar jobs.
Grudova told Young that “the chaos of humanity can often be seen through small messes,” which provides vital context to understanding her work. This is why she is driven to incorporate the smaller, more taboo ‘grossness’ of humanity into her writing—to expose the darkest parts of society through the lens of unsuspecting mundane absurdities. In The Coiled Serpent, she achieves this by focusing on unlikely protagonists in her stories who often find themselves trapped in a job or a situation where they are forced to deal with uncomfortable and unwanted circumstances, which allows the micro horrors of the world to surface.
Grudova touches on her writing style, referring to herself as a “method writer.” She describes this somewhat theatrical technique as a way to connect with the characters she is writing about to understand their experiences completely, and she does so by immersing herself in the story. She provides an example of one of her characters who was on an only meat diet, for which she also adopted a strictly meat diet during the writing process. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys reading biographies as they provide an intimate map of someone’s life—and unpacking the mystery behind the inner workings of individuals is crucial to her work. When asked about the unique merits of short fiction compared to novels, Grudova says that most writers naturally gravitate to one format over the other. She says that while she tends to lean towards short fiction in her work, “stories tell you very quickly what form it needs to be in,” and she insists that it can’t be forced either way.
She also briefly criticizes the way that short fiction writing and the folktale tradition has been traditionally associated with working-class women. She says that she doesn’t understand why “women writers are only ever compared to other female writers, why not Samuel Beckett?” Grudova challenges class and gender inequities in the literary landscape by asking such an evocative question.
The evening concluded with loose mentions of a research project underway, suggesting that a new publication could be on the horizon for Grudova. As one of the most refreshing voices in contemporary fiction literature, I look forward to whatever strange and beautiful stories she will create as her career continues to unfold. This event proved that while Grudova’s work can sometimes be unexpected, the wonderful weirdness it encapsulates certainly never will be.
Image by Emma Mackenzie