Karen Powell grew up in Rochester, Kent. She left school at 16 but returned to education in her mid-20s, reading English Literature at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. She lives with her family in York and works at York Minster Fund, a charity that raises money for the conservation and restoration of York Minster. Powell's debut novel, The River Within (Europa, December 1, 2020), was awarded a Northern Writers TLC New Fiction Prize.
On your nightstand now:
The Doll Factory by Elizabeth MacNeal, Underland by Robert MacFarlane, Summerwater by Sarah Moss, The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton is the first book I can remember reading for myself. I was enchanted by the idea of climbing into magical lands through the clouds that pulled up at the top of the tree, and by all of the characters who lived in the tree: Moonface, Dame Washalot, the Saucepan Man. I wanted nothing more than to sit on a cushion and slide down the Slippery Slip which ran down the middle of the trunk from Moonface's house at the top. When I was older, I was obsessed by the Anne of Green Gables books and am always happy to revisit them. The death of Matthew Cuthbert is one of the saddest scenes in literature! I also read the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder on repeat and all of the Swallows and Amazons books by Arthur Ransome. I maintain that I knew how to sail before I ever stepped into a boat because of Ransome's precise descriptions. One of the joys of living in the north of England is being able to go walking in the Lake District where most of the books are set.
Your top five authors:
I read mainly contemporary fiction these days, but I was brought up on the 19-century novel, and then came to Fitzgerald in my later teens, so these are my bedrock.
Thomas Hardy
Emily Brontë
Charlotte Brontë
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Jane Austen
Book you've faked reading:
I was going to say none; that I feel no compunction to have read anything in particular, but a supervisor at university once said, "You all read [Peter] Carey, of course," and all three in the room nodded sagely. At least one of them was lying.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden. Not many people seem to read her these days, but to my mind this is one of the best coming-of-age novels, capturing that perilous period in life when you are on the cusp of adulthood but not yet fully equipped for its demands. Less obscure is the brilliant Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. I love his playfulness with form, the joyousness of abandoning a conventional or reverential treatment of a historical subject. It's a novel bursting with energy, managing to be funny and heartbreakingly sad at the same time. I am thinking in particular of a character who dies just as he has plucked up the courage to consummate his relationship with the woman he loves, and is doomed, forever, to hotfoot it around a graveyard in spirit form, weighed down by an enormous, priapic penis.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I loved the cover of Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams, though I thought it was a shame that it was pitched as a black Bridget Jones, it being a much more serious novel. (Helen Fielding is an excellent writer, too!)
Book you hid from your parents:
I can't remember hiding anything. It wasn't that kind of household though I'm sure my mother was horrified by the fact that I was as happy reading trashy airport novels as Austen and the Brontës.
Book that changed your life:
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain. It's a desperately moving account of her life as a nurse in the First World War and the horrific losses she endured, but what affected me equally was her struggle to escape her life in genteel Buxton to study at Oxford. There were so many barriers in her way--her lack of a classical education, her parents' opposition, the expectations of society at that time--but she overcame all of them. Having ducked out of education early on and found myself, quite by my own failures, mired in a suburban life that I found deadening, this book gave me the courage to start again.
Favorite line from a book:
I'm not sure I have one in particular. It depends on my mood. What comes to mind is the devastating moment from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, when Hardy tells us, " 'Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess." Being a bit of a misery-guts, I do love a bit of tragedy. On the flipside, I love this from Graham Greene: "He had an easy rapid insolence you had no time to resent before he had given fresh cause for annoyance." Until I read Our Man in a Havana, I had always thought Greene a bit dreary, had not realized how funny he could be.
Five books you'll never part with:
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Tender Is the Night
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I would love to discover Elena Ferrante's marvelous Neapolitan Quartet. Imagine meeting Lenu and Lila playing with their dolls in that courtyard for the first time again; having all of their intertwining histories stored up for the winter ahead.