Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking
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.
About the author
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.
Judge Abigail Shinn on Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking
"Composed as a series of portraits, some fragmentary, all multi-faceted and allusory, Smith’s novel is a hallucinatory window into what it means to excavate the past in a world committed to its erasure.
"At once a poignant coming of age story and an exploration of how language is shaped by ideology, Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is tender and merciless in its slanting look at the history of state violence and its unacknowledged but profound effects on individuals and communities.
"An important reminder that the stories we tell can serve as propaganda and as powerful works of resistance, Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking, demonstrates how the novel can reflect and resist the double speak of our own time."