For her devotees

Readers grow faithful to their favourite authors – to their style, their literary landscapes, and the moods their books create. Readers of Deborah Levy’s work have come to know and love her idiosyncratic voice. Her texts plunge readers into quotidian worlds made surreal and her narrators point out the humour and strangeness of everyday life.

In 2013, after decades of publishing novels, short story collections, and plays, Levy became globally celebrated with her first foray into non-fiction. In her trilogy of ‘Living Autobiographies’, she wrote her life as it unfolded before her, as she rode waves of change and rupture. Her first book of non-fiction since this trilogy, The Position of Spoons is a collection of thirty-four short works of creative fiction and non-fiction, some as brief as a page and a half. The book is flooded with Levyesque turns of phrase – ‘these sockless people have a kind of abandon in their body’ – and, in its typical fashion, Levy’s writing transforms the world into a place more elaborate than it seems. Many of the essays have been published elsewhere, as articles in magazines or as introductions to new editions or translations of the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Violette Leduc, J. G. Ballard, and more.