Giada Scodellaro’s Ruins, Child and Anna Poletti’s Hello, World? are very different books. Scodellaro won the 2024 Novel Prize; her book stitches together a history of Black feminist poetry, theory and prose. Poletti’s novel is a work of queer erotic introspection, investigating the limits of domination and submission.
There’s not much to connect them in terms of style, theme or ambition. If there is a common anchor, it is that both dispense with the traditional mechanisms of narrative. They abandon conventional chapter and paragraph forms, prioritising “fragments” as the unit of construction.
