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Interviews

The Guardian Books Podcast

An interview with Richard Lea on The Shapeless Unease

‘On this week’s show, Richard sits down with Samantha Harvey. After four finely-crafted novels including The Western Wind (2018), Harvey suddenly found herself unable to sleep. Not sleeping badly, or sleeping a bit, but not sleeping at all. Her response is a restless, urgent memoir of the year she spent not sleeping: The Shapeless Unease.’

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Awards Press

The Staunch Book Prize

The Western Wind is the winner of the 2019 Staunch Book Prize

‘A fascinating insight into the times, the privations, the sheer smallness and hardship of life that grinds on at subsistance level.  Descriptions are achingly vivid – you feel the mud, the cold, the wet, the misery as if you were there, yet the result is not only intriguing but entertaining. The mystery unravels backwards in time, the language feels right and this unique, deftly told story is exquisitely handled in every respect.’

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Press

The Shapeless Unease – published 9th January 2020

“What a spectacularly good book. It is so controlled and yet so WILD. One of the best books I’ve read about writing. One of the best books I’ve read about swimming. One of the best books I’ve read about mourning. And easily one of the truest and best books I’ve read about what it’s like to be alive now, in this country. “ – Max Porter

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Press

Villa Lugara

I just spent a week teaching prose writing at the beautiful Villa Lugara in Italy. We plan to run more courses next year, so if you are interested in taking part please be in touch.
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Awards

The Walter Scott Prize shortlist

‘The Western Wind’ is one of six novels on the 2019 shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize.

It is alongside novels by Peter Carey, Cressida Connolly, Andrew Miller, Michael Ondaatje and Robin Robertson.
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Awards

Waterstones Fiction Book of the Month

‘The Western Wind’ is March Fiction Book of the Month at Waterstones

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Articles Press

The Wall Street Journal Fiction Review

Shrovetide Confessions: Murder, suicide or accident? A late-15th-century English town weighs in on the sudden death of its most prominent citizen

‘In this superb novel, time, like guilt, is a murky medium, at once advancing and circling back, and pulling humankind helplessly between its battling currents.’

Go to the review

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Press

The New York Times Book Review

‘Harvey’s is a story of suspense, yes. It is a story of a community crowded with shadows and secrets. But to read this novel is to experience a kind of catharsis. In John Reve, a 15th-century priest at war with his instincts and inclinations and at times even with his own flock, we find a kind of Everyman, and Harvey delivers a singular character at once completely unfamiliar and wholly universal.’

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Articles

Bartering With The Facts: How a Novelist Solves a Historical Problem

An essay in Publishers Weekly on truth and accuracy in historical fiction

‘Having bestrewn my novel with pockets, for example, I discovered that the clothes of European medieval men and women didn’t have them. No pockets? Where did they put their things? Where did they put their cold hands?’

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Articles Press

Brief, Brutal and Gone

An essay for Powell’s asking what anxiety is and whether people had it in the Middle Ages

‘Firstly, I don’t sleep much anymore. A year ago sleep left me. I’ve spent the year in a complex postmortem of the sort that often follows a relationship breakup. What did I do to make it leave? What can I do to get it back? Is it possible to learn to survive without it? A year of counseling, hypnotherapy, acupuncture, mindfulness, CBT, meditation, supplements, drugs, and general earnest searching has left my questions with the following answers, respectively: Unclear. Unclear. No. 

The two or three years prior to that I’d been working on a novel set in the late middle ages, whose genesis was confession — confession of the Catholic sort that happens in a booth, a little dark box. I’m not a Catholic and have never confessed, but I’m drawn to the idea of this little dark box. The waiting priest, ear to the grille. The stooped, whispering penitent. A bizarre, mystic theatre. Alongside that, mundane everydayness — spiritual absolution made routine. You come in, you confess, you agree to a penance and you are absolved; it might take less than five minutes. In the middle ages, the overworked priest urged his penitent to be brief, be brutal, be gone.’ 

Read the essay