Though Uschi Gatward, who has died aged 49 of cancer, produced just a single collection of short stories, it proved to be a remarkably effective one. English Magic (2021) is a book with an atmosphere of its own, the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
The first story, The Clinic, opens with a deceptively simple declaration: “It’s set up to look like a home, with sofas and a coffee table, but nobody’s fooled.” Immediately, the familiar becomes discomfiting. From there, the straightforward reality of taking a toddler to a clinic becomes a disturbing whirl of paranoia, state surveillance and societal disapproval. Soon the toddler’s family is fighting for survival – heading out for the wilderness after buying camping supplies in a shop where even the plastic mannequins are ominous.
Reviewers compared this dystopian nightmare to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but Uschi had a humour and an eye for detail of her own: “Cara’s dressed in her smartest clothes. I’m wearing my dumbest outfit, complete with slogan.”
The apparently mundane could be imbued with significance. In other stories, a bird stuck in a chimney begins to feel like a terrible portent, a popped balloon takes on tragic weight. The ritual of a picnic was viewed with the same eye for the uncanny as that of a pagan ceremony, taking the reader into the depths beyond the page. “She invites us to trust our imaginations,” noted Lara Pawson in the Guardian.
Uschi wrote about overlooked lives, seeing magic as a “resort of the dispossessed as much as the powerful, a rival to the established orthodoxy”. She thought of her work as protest fiction, detailing the experience of hard-up mothers, political prisoners, artists and political agitators. But while her characters were often on the precarious fringes of society, she did not romanticise or patronise them, because she was part of their world.
Born in Mile End, in the East End of London, Uschi (Urszula) was the daughter of Francesca Ellul, who had migrated from Malta in 1954, and Michael, later Stefan, Gatward. They were clerical workers; after they separated when Uschi was six, and divorced the following year (1979), she was brought up by her mother. Her ability as a student was noticed early and she was given a fee-assisted place at Alleyn’s school, Dulwich, from which she went on to gain an English literature degree (1994) at King’s College, Cambridge.
After graduating she worked in community theatre, writing, producing and directing her own plays including for New Wimbledon theatre and Charles Cryer theatre, Carshalton. But she made little headway, and one of the jobs she supported herself with was as a cleaner on the Heygate estate at Elephant and Castle in south-east London, where she had lived for part of her childhood.
In 2002 Uschi completed an MA in creative writing at the University of Sussex, and took a job with Arts Council South East. As a trade union representative there she helped colleagues receive a decent redundancy package when the organisation was downsized following the crash of 2008.
That year, too, she married the artist Matthew Krishanu. Uschi left Arts Council South East herself in 2010, and they had a daughter, Pearl. The family moved to a Live/Work council flat managed by Bow Arts Trust and Poplar HARCA housing association in the East End, in a scheme set up to benefit local residents through the arts. From this home, she and Matthew ran workshops and put on exhibitions. One of Matthew’s paintings featuring Uschi is in the Arts Council collection.
Uschi was finally able to write about the world around her, and her stories began to be anthologised and published online. My Brother Is Back won the 2015 Wasafiri prize; Oh Whistle And was shortlisted for the 2016 White Review prize.
They formed part of English Magic, and I got to know her through my publishing firm, Galley Beggar Press. The book’s first print run sold out within a month, its protest fiction being well and widely received. In the Daily Mail, Eithne Farry wrote of how in her “uneasy, excellent debut collection, the boundary between the earthly and the eerie is thin”.
Uschi’s cancer diagnosis came in the same month, September 2021, as the book’s publication. She is survived by Matthew, Pearl and her mother.
• Uschi (Urszula) Gatward, writer, born 12 June 1972; died 30 December 2021
