The Passengers: Shortlisted for The Rathbones Folio Prize 2023

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This book couldn’t have come into my life at a better time. It’s a guiding mate. It enters like a cat through a window, ready to take your attention and show you what it needs to.’ If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. It’s almost like a puzzle. You have to construct in your head what’s going on. Which can be different things, depending on what you see. You don’t know what’s going on and it’s like this is a message for you. This is the note that tells you what’s going on and you need to understand it but then you can’t really read it. It’s like a message in a bottle. It doesn’t say something about a particular time in history but it’s like a construction of that period instead. Ashon, Will (November 2018). Chamber Music: Enter the Wu-Tang (in 36 Pieces). Granta Books. ISBN 9781783784035.

Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Hawes, James (22 July 2006). "Review: Clear Water by Will Ashon". the Guardian . Retrieved 12 May 2018. A nation’s psyche comes to the surface. The Passengers is not just an oral history of the contemporary moment but, drenched in mood and texture, renders the country itself as a sonic collage.’ I think I became interested in writing in my late teens, but I’m not sure I was ever interested in becoming “a writer” – I’m still embarrassed to say it now. I like the writing part more than the identity/career part, to be honest. This book couldn't have come to life at a better time... It enters like a cat through a window, ready to take your attention and show you what it needs to." —Tice Cin

Will Ashon

So I stopped. Instead, I started taping other people and making monologues of their words, crunching them up against other people’s words, simulating conversations or building representations or intersubjective testimonials . I called it direct reported speech, a phrase I was sure I’d seen somewhere, though I couldn’t for the life of me find out where. And what I meant by that was that it felt as if the people who I wrote up in this way were talking directly to the reader with my role that of ghostly ectoplasm, barely visible between the two, every last one of them saying I to you. I’m not sure I’m self-aware enough to answer this question. In terms of writing, I was very influenced by Georges Perec’s lifelong attempt to try to create as many different forms of text as possible. And hip hop culture has probably done as much to shape my outlook and attitude towards art, broadly conceived, as anything else. Engrossing...The variety of voices collected here reminds us of the uniqueness of every individual's perspective...It is an artful addition to the oral history genre." ― Financial Times Anonymous testimonies collected from people across the UK create a snapshot of dreams and frustrations, pain and joy... a nation’s psyche comes to the surface. The Passengers is not just an oral history of the contemporary moment but, drenched in mood and texture, renders the country itself as a sonic collage." —Guardian

A spectacularly enjoyable and compelling reading experience . . . funny, moving, surprising and thought-provoking. It humanises literature in this toxic moment.’ A nation's psyche comes to the surface. The Passengers is not just an oral history of the contemporary moment but, drenched in mood and texture, renders the country itself as a sonic collage.' The Passengers by Will Ashon (Faber) is shortlisted for the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize. The winner is announced on Monday 27March. There’s so much good stuff here. Obviously Margo Jefferson is a must, I’m really looking forward to Darren McGarvey’s book, Yomi Ṣode’s Manorism looks right up my street, I have Zaffar Kunial and Daisy Hildyard in a pile somewhere, and I’ve been wanting to read Pure Colour by Sheila Heti since it came out. The conceit of Scary Monsters sounds like my sort of thing, as well. That’s about half of the list already… shame I’m such a terribly slow reader. Ashon's gloriously polyphonic book scales the heights. A deeply felt and humane portrait of where we are.'

Other Will Ashon Books

There’s so much room for projection. You can read anything into anything. Sometimes when I’m sad I’ll text my boyfriend and then, whatever he replies it will read as unsympathetic. You know what I mean? It doesn’t really matter what it says because you’re in that headspace. The main reason I noticed this book was because the cover design immediately brought to mind Craig Taylor's Londoners. This must surely have been intentional. It sounded like a very similar concept -- interviews with "ordinary people" giving insight into their lives. The Passengers by Will Ashon (Faber) is shortlisted for the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize. The winner will be announced on Monday 27March at the British Library.

a b Marianne Brace (15 February 2008). "Will Ashon: a thoroughly modern novelist". The Independent. Archived from the original on 26 February 2010 . Retrieved 19 May 2009. A spectacularly enjoyable and compelling reading experience . . . funny, moving, surprising and thought-provoking. It humanises literature in this toxic moment.' The Passengers by Will Ashon review – voices of a nation". the Guardian. 4 August 2022 . Retrieved 2 September 2022. Life is a flux. It’s constantly moving. It’s like a river – it just carries on, it happens and moves, it changes. We stopped next to these fir trees and my daughter said, What’s that noise? What’s going on? We’re looking around for this strange buzzing sound, for this noise. And eventually we looked up and the trees were covered, literally covered, in bees.

London, Open Pen (21 May 2020). "Not Far From The Junction". Open Pen . Retrieved 2 September 2022. His mum dreamed it was the Resurrection Day. The end of the world. She was out on a beach with the whole family and all of a sudden the waves of the sea were going all on top of us. And the whole world, every single person in the world, just came to where that sea is. And the water was going on top of us. I was running, trying to get to shelter or whatever. But there was nowhere to go – except that sea. In this particular dream, while everybody is running into that sea and getting under that particular wave that’s coming through, she was saying, Repent to God, repent to God, repent to God. Cos what’s about to happen is worse. In our religion we do translate dreams. It’s like a shaken message, y’know? It just shakes you, type of thing. Will Ashon (born 1969) is an English writer and novelist, former music journalist and founder of the Big Dada imprint of Ninja Tune records. [1] It’s almost like a puzzle,” suggests one interviewee, “It doesn’t say something about a particular time in history but it’s a like a construction of that period.” Another puts their finger on the mosaic quality more colloquially: “It looks like it’s wobbly. The ground looks like it’s shaking.”

Seemingly simple yet so deeply profound, The Passengers is an absorbing insight into the lives and minds of so-called ordinary people: their hopes and fears and idiosyncrasies at a specific moment in time.’ You could argue that the way Woolf slips between consciousnesses inevitably merges them to some extent, but then it seems to me that our consciousnesses overlap, and it’s in those graceful slides from one to another that some part of her genius lies. Not now, Bernard!I tried killing myself. I tried hanging myself after I come out. It actually helped with my PTSD because I’ve got brain damage to me memory, so I can’t remember a lot of me time in the army, do you know what I mean? It kinda worked, kinda helped in a way, yeah [laughs]. I was hanging for that long that I damaged me memory.