Born and raised in north-west London, Sheena Patel is a writer and director for film and TV. Her debut novel, I’m a Fan, about a woman obsessing over her lover’s other lover, was published last year by Rough Trade Books and is out now in paperback (Granta). It has been shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas prize and the Jhalak prize, and was longlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction. Patel is part of the poetry collective 4 Brown Girls Who Write, with whom she has published a poetry collection.
1. Nonfiction
I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour
I read this biography like a blockbuster. I was actually fighting sleep to read it. Rhys’s life was so intense and eventful: her work was misunderstood in her time, and she was presumed dead for a lot of it. Seymour writes so evocatively, you feel like you are in the room. Politically, I think Rhys and I would differ hugely, and I think she would have been a nightmare to be around, but Wide Sargasso Sea rearranged my brain when I read it. She was light years ahead of her generation.
2. Film
Cow (dir Andrea Arnold, 2021)
This documentary is on iPlayer but I saw it in the cinema. The film tells the story of one dairy cow and is so heart-wrenching. Arnold is an exquisite film-maker: she is able to make the screen feel like skin – real, splitting, desire and pain and yearning come through her films. This is about a single dairy cow but somehow expands to womanhood. It’s disturbing and poetic, and apparently people were throwing up after seeing it, which should absolutely be an artist’s objective. The soundtrack is also excellent.
3. Radio
Shock and War: Iraq 20 Years On (BBC Sounds)
I mean. I did shout at the podcast every time Tony Blair spoke. This tells in excruciating detail the lead-up to the war, the decisions behind it and why it happened the way it did. You want to know why people can’t vote Labour or have lost faith in politics? I think you can pinpoint it to this moment in our recent history. What we’ve subjected the Afghan and Iraqi people to is beyond any shade of shame. I wonder if this fear of the people arriving in boats is an expression of our deep guilt.
4. Art
Grenfell by Steve McQueen, Serpentine Gallery, London
This 24-minute film, on at the Serpentine Gallery until 10 May, is devastating. It is held in one shot, starting from the green and pleasant fields of England before swooping into the tower block, still burning before it was covered up. It is shot like his film Static, of New York’s Statue of Liberty, a repetitive, unflinching eye, forcing you to look. It is a wound, it is a body. The experience was like going to a funeral. I wish only a curse on this government.
5. TV
This US series is old but we haven’t had it in the UK till now. What a wild ride! It is so dark and unexpected and really nails us millennials in all our narcissistic glory. It follows the fortunes of a group of friends as they move from their 20s to their mid-30s, which sounds annoying but it isn’t. It is darkly brilliant and full of imagination and unexpected ideas. The sudden turns through the entire series are gut-wrenchingly good and funny – but not in a “ha ha” way, more in a way that feels like a car crash.
6. People
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe
Falsely imprisoned by the Iranian government and then having her suffering exacerbated by the ineptitude of Boris “them’s the breaks” Johnson, she was essentially held hostage. What the Tory government has subjected Nazanin to should haunt the politicians involved for the rest of their days. I cried with relief when she landed back in the UK. She has shown an incredible amount of dignity.
