Moses McKenzie, 26, won last year’s Hawthornden prize, previously awarded to Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, for his 2022 debut, An Olive Grove in Ends, set among Jamaicans and Somalis in Bristol, where he grew up. William Waldegrave, a Tory MP in the city from 1979 to 1997, wrote in the New Statesman that the novel was “astonishing... rather as Dickens introduced complaisant Victorians to some of what was going on around them in the cities, McKenzie tells us what is actually happening”. His new novel, Fast By the Horns, returns to Bristol to follow a 14-year-old Rastafarian in 1980, the year of the St Pauls riot.
How did you research a book set before you were born?
With An Olive Grove in Ends, I’ll never [now] write a book where I have to do as little research. Fast By the Horns needed more, but most of it was conversations. It’s a period in living memory. My dad lived through it, my uncles, my auntie, my mum lived through it. I’ve been surrounded by stories of that time from yute.
Why did you want to write about that period?
I was thinking about the predicament of the black British diaspora. In the 80s, Rastafari was saying we need to go home. The narrator was raised in that idea and doesn’t want to challenge it, but the novel constantly brings him back to reality. So if the solution is: “Let’s go back to Shashamane Land [in Ethiopia]”, cool. But what happens to the black people here? And what is Shashamane Land actually like? You have to deal with the reality of who Haile Selassie was. So many Ethiopians talk about how his rule [1930-1974] was oppressive; for a group that denounces hierarchy, Rastafari is incredibly patriarchal.
Were there any models for the book?
Jabari [the narrator] has no time for compassion or introspective ability. He was only taught to be resilient, to keep going. It’s difficult to write in the first person and create empathy for a character like that. The Catcher in the Rye definitely influenced my thinking about how to do it. I knew the book needed to be short because the voice is so strong – eventually it would just get annoying.
