Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2024
'Tender and merciless . . . a hallucinatory window into what it means to excavate the past in a world committed to its erasure' ABIGAIL SHINN, Goldsmiths Prize Judge
'Kaleidoscopic and beguiling . . . A singular and thrilling debut that shows what happens when objective truth and meaning are drowned in the shifting river of history and politics' ANDREW McMILLAN
'A novel full of hopeful glitter - and one I know I will return to' A K BLAKEMORE, Guardian
'Insightful, affecting and assured . . . Written with a poetry as defamiliarising as it is rich' OISÍN FAGAN
'Strange, intriguing, exhilarating' CAMILLA GRUDOVA
The almost daughter is almost normal, because she knows how to know and also not know.
She knows and does not know, for instance, about the barracks by the athletics field, and about the lonely woman she visits each week. She knows - almost - about ghosts, and their ghosts, and she knows not to have questions about them. She knows to focus on being a woman: on training her body and dreaming only of escape.
Then, the almost daughter meets Oksana. Oksana is not even almost normal, and the questions she has are not normal at all.
Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is the story of a young woman coming of age in a town reckoning with its brutal past, for readers of Milkman and A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.
 

Han Smith grew up in Japan, Russia and elsewhere. A queer writer, translator and adult literacy teacher, Han is the recipient of a 2019/2020 London Writers Award, was shortlisted for the 2019 Mslexia Novella Award, the Bridport Prize and the Desperate Literature short story prize, and was longlisted for the Brick Lane short story prize. She has also been published by Five Dials, Cipher Press, Hotel, Versopolis, LossLit, Litro, The Interpreter's House and the European Poetry Festival. She lives in London. Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is her debut novel.