Sunday Times Literary Awards shortlist - Karen Jennings on her novel ‘Crooked Seeds’

By Jennifer Platt and Karen Jennings

FICTION COVERAGE

Criteria: The winner should be a novel of rare imagination and style, evocative, textured and a tale so compelling as to become an enduring landmark of contemporary fiction.

Crooked Seeds by Karen Jennings (Karavan Books) is shortlisted for the Sunday Times fiction prize, in partnership with Exclusive Books. Jennings discusses the genesis of her novel.

I am going to share something with you that isn’t commonly known: there is an unwritten, unspoken set of rules, a type of etiquette that ought to be followed when it comes to writers. It is quite simple. Never ask a writer any of the following three questions:

1. What are you working on at the moment?
2. How’s the writing going?
3. Where do you find inspiration?

Unfortunately, most people are not aware of these rules, and writers around the world are stuck trying to explain the inexplicable, trying to tame their existential scream of despair, failure and fear into polite small talk or a pithy reply to an interview question. Few realise that asking a writer to explain the writing process and to pinpoint their moment of inspiration is like asking them to dive headfirst back into a traumatic event they would much rather forget. But perhaps I am speaking for myself only. Perhaps it is only my experience as a writer that is so relentlessly painful, where I am pulled into the world of my characters so completely that I am living a series of strange half-lives between the pages of my manuscript and my own supposedly real life.

I do not exaggerate when I say that writing Crooked Seeds was like waking up each day with a knife already sheathed in my belly, and then choosing to grab that knife by the handle and twist and twist and twist. Is it any wonder that when people saw me in the aisle of a supermarket or tried to video call me, I stared back at them in resentment and confusion?

I know what you’re thinking — if it’s so bad, why turn the knife? Why even begin at all? In the ancient world poets were chosen by the bees, which would settle on their lips and fill them with talent. Later, in the Elizabethan era, Marlowe’s Faustus showed us that inspiration could be bought for as small a price as one’s soul. I don’t know what was done to me, or chosen by me to bless/curse me with being a writer, but what I know is that no matter the reason, inspiration is always exciting and terrifying, creating a tremendous, suffocating burden for the author to bear alone, entirely alone.

So, what about now, here, in 2025, as we writers stand on the brink of being done away with by AI? What is inspiration now, what is a writer? Right before our eyes, everything is beginning to alter, too rapidly for us to be fully able to understand. Inspiration is becoming prompts typed into a program. A writer has become AI scanning through all knowledge in the matter of seconds and churning out a manuscript it has not had to suffer for. Or am I being unfair? Does AI feel as we do, wondering whether its message will be understood, whether its book will sell badly, be a disappointment, be a failure, be viewed as meaningless?

I cannot say, not truly, where my inspiration comes from, not for Crooked Seeds, not for anything I write. It exists somewhere between a bee’s kiss and a pact with the devil. But for how long can that be enough? How long until a question like this is answered with no more than a series of prompts and the name of the AI program used to do the creating, followed by a hyperlink that takes you to the site where you can buy it?

EXTRACT

DEIDRE

She woke with the thirst already upon her, still in her clothes, cold from having slept on top of the covers. Two days, three, since she had last changed; the smell of her overcast with sweat, fried food, cigarettes. Underwear’s stink strong enough that it reached her even before she moved to squat over an old plastic mixing bowl that lived beside the bed. She steadied her weight on the bed frame with one hand, the other holding on to the seat of a wooden chair that creaked as she lowered herself. She didn’t have to put the light on, knew by the burn and smell that the urine was dark, dark as cough syrup, as sickness.

There was no toilet paper, so she rose without wiping, pulling the underwear back into place, feeling it dampen a little. Usually she would reach across, open the window, empty the bowl over the rockery that lined that part of the building’s wall, but there had been complaints, a warning. Instead, she took a T-shirt that was lying on the floor and covered the mouth of the bowl with it, before sitting down on the chair. In sleep, the plate of her top front teeth had come loose, protruding a little over her lips. Impossible with her dry mouth to push it back into place. She pulled, snagging it on cracked skin, causing her to switch on the lamp, to feel for blood with her fingertips. None. Then put the teeth on the bedside table next to a mug from which the tea had long since evaporated.

She shifted her leg, lazy to reach for crutches where she had dropped them the night before. It was no distance from the chair to the place described as a kitchen, with its bar fridge, sink, counter, and microwave. She took hold of the chairback, the chest of drawers, the TV stand, the various items that she had refused to give up and which she had crammed into this room, making her way slowly across to the fridge. She did not bother to move onwards to the sink, knowing that the taps would be empty. The microwave clock read 05:18. Forty minutes before the water truck came. Nothing until then.

Inside the fridge was a packet of discoloured Vienna sausages, opened a week ago; half a tub of margarine; a jar of gherkins. She unscrewed the lid of the jar, drank down the brine, closing her mouth against its solids, then reached for a Vienna to blunt the sting, its puckered ends like plastic. She spat out what couldn’t be chewed, ate two more, spat again, then drew her forearm across her mouth, seeing afterward the smear of grit and slime, and flakes of hideous pink.