Emergency
Daisy Hildyard
The Judges said:
Hildyard undoes proximity and relation so as to reorientate the reader toward catastrophe. A profoundly conceived novel that breaches our own myopia.
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Emergency is a novel about the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth. Stuck at home alone under lockdown, a woman recounts her 1990s childhood in rural Yorkshire. She watches a kestrel hunting, helps a farmer with a renegade bull, and plays outside with her best friend, Clare.
A story of remote violence and a work of praise for a persistently lively world, Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency reinvents the pastoral novel for the climate change era.
Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions
Daisy Hildyard’s debut novel, Hunters in the Snow, came out with Jonathan Cape in 2013 and received the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards. Her essay The Second Body was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. She lives in York with her family.
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Five Questions for Daisy Hildyard
Which is your favourite book of recent years?
Svetlana Alexievich’s oral histories.
Which three books would you take to your Desert Island?
- A book of early modern poetry
- Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table
- Anna Karenina
What is your ‘if you don’t like this, you can’t be my friend’ book?
Away From Me by Caleb Klaces.
Who or what have been your most important influences?
Animals.
If you weren’t a writer, what would you be doing?
As little as possible, I’m instinctively lazy.
