It’s a project she first explains as being inspired by the authors she was reading and studying when she started working on the collection in 2014, writers such as Sarah Hall, Kelly Link, Karen Russell and Mary Gaitskill. “A lot of short-story writers are … creating stories that otherwise might be realistic, but have this seed of change in the middle,” Johnson says, citing Hall’s award-winning story Mrs Fox, in which a woman changes into a vixen during a woodland walk: “The transformation destroys the reality around it.” Water is definitely Ms Johnson’s medium. Her Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel Everything Under (2018) is set along the canals of Oxford, where she now lives. While her short story in Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold (2020) retells ‘The Green Children of Woolpit’ Suffolk tale with a tainted well. Read More Related Articles Just finished rereading Daisy Johnson's story collection Fen. Just as powerful and beautiful and dark and strange as the first time. One of my favourite books of all time. -- Jeff Vandermeer

My favourite line is taken from How To F**K A Man You Don’t Know: “Talking about Iraq and the Booker shortlist.. You think this makes him knowing and intellectual”(60). Kushner, Rachel; Burns, Anna; Edugyan, Esi; Robertson, Robin; Powers, Richard; Johnson, Daisy (13 October 2018). "How I write: Man Booker shortlist authors reveal their inspirations". The Guardian . Retrieved 13 October 2018. Vanderhoof, Erin (1 November 2018). "How 27-Year-Old Author Daisy Johnson Re-Invented the Oedipus Myth". Vanity Fair. Within these magical, ingenious stories lies all of the angst, horror and beauty of adolescence. A brilliant achievement." (Evie Wyld) Johnson, Daisy (7 January 2015). "There Was a Fox in the Bedroom". Boston Review . Retrieved 13 October 2018.

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Daisy Johnson was the youngest author ever shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2018, at the age of 27 (Image: Pollyanna Johnson) Living in Ely when she was very little, in an attic bedroom within sight of Ely Cathedral, Ms Johnson developed a one-sided correspondence with the magnificent ‘ship of the Fens’. You watch yourself pretend you’ve never known anything in your life and never much felt the compulsion to. You want to make him think you have no history or education; that you might have had language once but it’s gone now. You want to make him think you’re so scrubbed clean of any sort of intelligence that he can lay himself out on you and you’ll soak him up.” Johnson says she was never one of the teenagers hiding shots under the table in the local pub, or bumming a cigarette in the car park outside. “I was always very good. A lot of my work ethos comes down to guilt. I don’t know if that’s good, but that’s the way it works. I never would have been one of those people, which is why maybe I can write about them, from an outside point of view.” Daisy Johnson's book came to me by chance. I retweeted a contest, didn't know what books to say I liked, and was given a surprise bundle. The moment I read the blurb, I knew I had to read it. So I've been dipping in and out. Female protagonists each find themselves rooted in a British landscape that's familiar, but surrounded by a world that isn't.

The plan is to select and read a book every month, then discuss the work during the month’s last week (to give everyone time to read it!). I will post some questions/quotes to get things started, but I would love for this to grow into an open discussion with and between you all. Whenever possible I hope to have the author, or another prominent voice on the subject, join the conversation. Real people live their lives here. They wrestle with familiar instincts, with sex and desire, with everyday routine. But the wild is always close at hand, ready to erupt. This is a place where animals and people commingle and fuse, where curious metamorphoses take place, where myth and dark magic still linger. So here a teenager may starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl. A woman might give birth to a – well what? Flood, Alison (23 July 2018). "Man Booker prize 2018 longlist includes graphic novel for the first time". The Guardian . Retrieved 24 July 2018. Poetic, risky... Johnson's slippery and sensual stories-cum-chapters have an amphibious elemental quality and a contemporary provincial witchiness of their own. -- Phil Baker * Sunday Times *England was the language of breaking and bending and it would suit our mouths better. None of us would ever fall in love with English. We would be safe from that.” As part of my work with UN Women, I have started reading OUR SHARED SHELF IS CURRENTLY DORMANT AND NOT MANAGED BY EMMA AND HER TEAM. She’s already working on novel exploring another liminal zone – the network of canals that thread through post-industrial Britain. Mixed with the nervousness that makes Johnson sit up straight in her chair, measuring out each answer with stop-start care, is a confidence that the wide spaces of the fen have helped her to find her voice.