Spent Light
‘A woman contemplates her hand-me-down toaster and suddenly the whole world erupts into her kitchen, in all its brutality and loveliness: global networks of resource extraction and forced labour, technologies of industrial murder, histories of genocide, alongside traditions of craft, the pleasures of convenience and dexterity, the giving and receiving of affection and care … Spent Light asks us to begin the work of de-enchanting all the crap we gather around ourselves to fend off the abyss – because we’ll never manage that anyway, the book warns, the abyss is already in us. But love is too. There might be no home to be found in objects, but there’s one to be made with other people. I think, in the end, this powerful, startling book is a love letter.’ – Jennifer Hodgson
About the author
Lara Pawson lives on the edge of London, as close as she can get to the forest. She is the author of three books, including Spent Light (CB editions, 2024). This is The Place to Be (CB editions, 2016), a memoir, was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2017, the Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2017 and the PEN Ackerley Prize 2017.
In the Name of the People (IB Tauris, 2014), an investigation into a massacre in Angola, was longlisted for the Orwell Book Prize 2015 and was runner-up in the Royal Africa Society Book of the Year 2014. Formerly a BBC World Service journalist, she has made numerous radio programmes and has written for the national and international press on politics, literature and art.
Judge Sara Baume on Spent Light
"It is impossible to predict, at the beginning of almost every paragraph of Spent Light, where it will have taken the reader by the end."
"With a remorseless attention to detail Pawson encounters familiar objects and excavates from each a portal to the past, or to a distant corner of the world, or to the shadows of the narrator’s complex mind.
"Spent Light is an evisceration of solemn reality, a novel that somehow manages to balance horror, humour and incredible tenderness."