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Observer best new novelists for 2025 by Hephzibah Anderson

`You think, am I allowed in this world?`

Anthony Shapland
A Room Above a Shop
(Granta, 13 March)

Anthony Shapland, 53, lives in Cardiff, just a short train ride from the valley town of Bargoed where he grew up, and which provides the unnamed setting for his fine and resonant first book.

`We used to joke that every six miles from Cardiff was a decade back in time. So in the 1980s, by the time you got to Bargoed you were in the 1950s,` he recalls.

A Room Above a Shop unfurls the story of a clandestine love affair between two men: B, who is young, and M, who is 11 years older. At only 160 pages long, its use of the continuous present tense and pared-down, imagistic prose amplifies all that goes unsaid between its characters.

Underpinning the drama`s intensity is Shapland`s own adolescent experience of realising that he was gay against a backdrop of the miners` strike, the Aids epidemic and age-of-consent debates. He turned 16 the year that section 28 (of the Local Government Act 1988, preventing councils from promoting homosexuality; eventually repealed) was passed.

Leaving Bargoed to pursue a career in fine art film-making, his writing emerged from the requirement to compose texts supporting his artistic practice. Eventually, the words came to seem more complex than the images.

Selection for the Hay festival`s 2023 writer at work programme led to an agent and, shortly afterwards, a book deal with Granta. He still manages g39, an artist run-space he founded in 1997, does odd jobs to make ends meet, and his working-class, rural roots mean he hasn`t yet stopped feeling like an outsider in literary circles. `You think, am I allowed to be here, in this world? I have the sense they`re going to go, `Who`s this jumped-up middle-aged bloke with a pencil?`

The era you capture here has been cropping up a lot lately in books and on the screen. Why now, do you think?
I think it`s because we`ve all reached an age where we can look back and get angry. It`s like this collective howl of `What was that?` Things like realising that section 28 didn`t just come from Thatcher, it came from public opinion - it was a horrible feeling. I had a paper round and I`d put newspapers through doors with headlines on where I was thinking, that might be me.

What`s shaped your literary style?
I tend to overwrite and then trim back. The finished book is just shy of 20,000 words but it reached 60,000 words twice. I had a really good mentor who I fanboyed, Cynan Jones. It`s wonderful when you find how you articulate yourself mirrored back, and he taught me so much. Also, the school I went to was next door to the Welsh language school. Sentence structure in Welsh will change how sentence structure happens for you in English - for example, sometimes emotions will be `on` you rather than felt by you.

Who`s your first reader?
My partner, but we do check in first about what`s actually being asked. It`s a bit like the traffic light system - red if something is very new and raw, and I basically want him to pat me on the back, tell me it`s not shit. Amber is an honest `I`m ready for it, what do you think?` And the third level, after many rewrites, is green for go - test the fault lines and show me where it breaks.

Reflecting on your journey to publication, is there a moment that`ll stick with you?
Going to Granta, I got a bit teary at the realisation that I wrote a thing, and every single person in the room knew what it was and was supporting it. When I was writing it, I told myself not to fetishise a book - this is writing first, it`s got to be good enough. Now I just want to see the finished novel] and feel it, although I`m not doing an unboxing [video].

Can you reveal anything about your next book?
It`s four stories that intersect so it feels like it might have to be a bit longer than my first.

Interview by Hephzibah Anderson
ISSN: 9-770029-771229-04
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jan/26/the-best-new-novelists-for-2025