At 52, award-winning Scottish poet Em Strang is publishing her debut novel. Quinn is narrated by a convicted murderer who gets a shot at redemption when the mother of his victim makes a gesture of what appears to be radical forgiveness. Visceral, incantatory and startlingly beautiful in places, it’s a book whose power is accentuated by its brevity. Strang spoke by Zoom at the end of a month-long literary retreat at Hawthornden Castle, where she was completing a new poetry collection and beginning her second novel.
You write in your acknowledgments that Quinn began with a single line. How did it evolve from there?
I actually did a lot of dance practice around it, feeling my way into the impulse to write something longer. For me, writing isn’t just an intellectual process – it’s very much a whole-body process, an emotional process, a spiritual process.
