New Zealander · b. 1979
Anna Smaill's debut novel "The Chimes" was longlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize. The New Zealand author imagined a post-catastrophe London where writing has been forgotten and music stores memory. Smaill, herself a trained violinist, created an elaborate alternate world where the acoustics of the city carry the past. Her fiction demonstrates how speculative premises can illuminate the present.