This One Sky Day
Dawn breaks across the archipelago of Popisho. The world is stirring awake again, each resident with their own list of things to do:
A wedding feast to conjure and cook
A cheating husband to discover
A lost soul to set free
As the sun rises, two star-crossed lovers try to find their second chance at abiding love. When night falls, all have been given a gift, and many are no longer the same.
The sky is pink, and some wonder if it will ever be blue again.
About the author
Leone Ross was born in England and grew up in Jamaica. Her first novel, 'All the Blood Is Red', was longlisted for the Orange Prize, and her second novel, 'Orange Laughter', was chosen as a BBC Radio 4 Women’s Hour Watershed Fiction favourite. Her short fiction has been widely anthologised and her first short-story collection, the 2017 'Come Let Us Sing Anyway' was nominated for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Saboteur Awards and the OCM BOCAS Prize.
Ross has taught creative writing for twenty years, at University College Dublin, Cardiff University and Roehampton University in London. She is editor of the first black British anthology of speculative fiction, due out in 2022 with Peepal Tree Press. Prior to writing fiction, Ross worked as a journalist. Leone Ross lives in London but intends to retire near water.
The judges on the shortlist
Fred D’Aguiar on 'This One Sky Day'
Bold, wild, uproarious, gawdy, bodacious, lyrical, effusive, carnivalesque, heraldic, liminal, expansive, fabulous, sensuous, sexy, hundred-story-jump and political fist-pump, replete with coordinates that big-up the poor and wrestle with authority, with the gender binary sharing space and place with the gender fluid, against the vexed reproduction of convention, only to buck expectation in favour of invention, of ellipsis in cahoots with culinary magic, obeah partnered with scandal, ribaldry as social cohesion, secrecy as a manifesto for desire’s rampant rule of island rhythm, 'This One Sky Day' insists on having its way with the surreal, fable and allegory (all three simultaneously) by relocating the center of thought in flesh, blood, bone and nerves, and in flora, fauna, land and sea, to create a world brimful with wonder and delight.