The Passengers: Shortlisted for The Rathbones Folio Prize 2023

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The closest thing to Ashon’s methodology in contemporary writing is the form of oral history pioneered by Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievitch. Like the Belarusian’s histories of Soviet and post-Soviet life, Passengers is formed from other people’s words, edited and arranged. Unlike Alexievitch, though, Ashon is not creating a history of a particular moment or phenomenon, but a record of the unfocused normal in all its randomness. An original and profound portrait of contemporary Britain told through the testimonies of its inhabitants.

The Passengers by Will Ashon review – voices of a nation". the Guardian. 4 August 2022 . Retrieved 2 September 2022. A renowned New York street photographer, Mermelstein’s latest book consisted only of images he took of people writing, conversing, texting on their phones—except the pictures aren’t of the people so much as their screens. The fragments of conversations, somewhat queasily snatched from over his subjects’ shoulders, add up to a story of a city. Quite an odd story, admittedly, but then it is New York… It looks like it’s wobbly. The ground looks like it’s shaking or something. Because the pieces don’t quite fit, so it looks like it’s wobbly. The person might be wobbling. It looks like an optical illusion, because she’s standing but it looks like she’s sitting down at the same time. I think he took a picture and then maybe split the picture into pieces, like maybe gradually cut it and then fixed it together. It looks like it is one thing but then you realise it’s lots of little pieces. Like, this would be one country, that would be another country, that would be a different country. It would look like it’s one picture, but it would be lots of different pictures. Then you can kind of tell a story, cos there’ll be lots of ideas. Otherwise if you actually know what’s happening, it’s not that interesting. His mum dreamed it was the Resurrection Day. The end of the world. She was out on a beach with the whole family and all of a sudden the waves of the sea were going all on top of us. And the whole world, every single person in the world, just came to where that sea is. And the water was going on top of us. I was running, trying to get to shelter or whatever. But there was nowhere to go – except that sea. In this particular dream, while everybody is running into that sea and getting under that particular wave that’s coming through, she was saying, Repent to God, repent to God, repent to God. Cos what’s about to happen is worse. In our religion we do translate dreams. It’s like a shaken message, y’know? It just shakes you, type of thing. You could argue that the way Woolf slips between consciousnesses inevitably merges them to some extent, but then it seems to me that our consciousnesses overlap, and it’s in those graceful slides from one to another that some part of her genius lies. Not now, Bernard!Life is a flux. It’s constantly moving. It’s like a river – it just carries on, it happens and moves, it changes. Seemingly simple yet so deeply profound, The Passengers is an absorbing insight into the lives and minds of so-called ordinary people: their hopes and fears and idiosyncrasies at a specific moment in time.' Hawes, James (22 July 2006). "Review: Clear Water by Will Ashon". the Guardian . Retrieved 12 May 2018.

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Seemingly simple yet so deeply profound, The Passengers is an absorbing insight into the lives and minds of so-called ordinary people: their hopes and fears and idiosyncrasies at a specific moment in time.’ There’s so much room for projection. You can read anything into anything. Sometimes when I’m sad I’ll text my boyfriend and then, whatever he replies it will read as unsympathetic. You know what I mean? It doesn’t really matter what it says because you’re in that headspace. From October 2018 to March 2021, the English novelist and nonfiction writer Will Ashon spent 30 months in a state of deep listening. He spoke to 100 people from across the UK by phone, online, or while hitchhiking. Like the men and women sporting cardboard confessions in a Gillian Wearing photograph, they told him secrets. They dug up half-forgotten memories, revealed hopes and dreams. He filleted those testimonies for vivid details, and juxtaposed them to hint at strange echoes and shared frequencies. Each is presented anonymously – no headings, no timestamps, no coordinates. In this way a nation’s psyche comes to the surface. The Passengers is not just an oral history of the contemporary moment but, drenched in mood and texture, renders the country itself as a sonic collage.The single most impressive thing I’ve read in the last few years was Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson. At the other end of the scale in terms of length, I also loved Olga Ravn’s The Employees, which is probably the book I’ve bought for the most people over the last few years. There’s so much good stuff here. Obviously Margo Jefferson is a must, I’m really looking forward to Darren McGarvey’s book, Yomi Ṣode’s Manorism looks right up my street, I have Zaffar Kunial and Daisy Hildyard in a pile somewhere, and I’ve been wanting to read Pure Colour by Sheila Heti since it came out. The conceit of Scary Monsters sounds like my sort of thing, as well. That’s about half of the list already… shame I’m such a terribly slow reader. A spectacularly enjoyable and compelling reading experience . . . funny, moving, surprising and thought-provoking. It humanises literature in this toxic moment.' The Passengers by Will Ashon,shortlisted for this year’s Rathbones Folio Prize, is a portrait of contemporary Britain told through a patchwork of voices, collected by Ashon over a period of three years. This extract, taken from the beginning of the book, gives a glimpse of the extraordinary collective portrait woven from these disparate, anonymous voices. You can’t be flippant about Alexievich, so I’ll leave it to her to do the talking (which seems somehow appropriate): ‘This is the way I see and hear the world: through voices, through details of everyday life. This genre – capturing human voices, confessions, testimonies – allows me to use all of my potential, because one has to be at the same time a writer, a journalist, a sociologist, a psychologist, and a priest.’

Extracted from The Passengers by Will Ashon (Faber) which is shortlisted for the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize. The winner is announced on Monday 27March. So I stopped. Instead, I started taping other people and making monologues of their words, crunching them up against other people’s words, simulating conversations or building representations or intersubjective testimonials . I called it direct reported speech, a phrase I was sure I’d seen somewhere, though I couldn’t for the life of me find out where. And what I meant by that was that it felt as if the people who I wrote up in this way were talking directly to the reader with my role that of ghostly ectoplasm, barely visible between the two, every last one of them saying I to you.This book couldn’t have come into my life at a better time. It’s a guiding mate. It enters like a cat through a window, ready to take your attention and show you what it needs to.’

The Passengersby Will Ashon,shortlisted for this year’s Rathbones Folio Prize, is a portrait of contemporary Britain told through a patchwork of voices, collected by Ashon over a period of three years. You can read an extract from the book here, and below, find out more about some of the polyphonic books that inspired The Passengers. Ashon’s gloriously polyphonic book scales the heights. A deeply felt and humane portrait of where we are.’ A nation’s psyche comes to the surface. The Passengers is not just an oral history of the contemporary moment but, drenched in mood and texture, renders the country itself as a sonic collage.’ I believe that there are people in life who you meet for a certain reason – and people can bring out certain aspectsof your character that maybe you didn’t know were there. You’ve met them for a reason and they’re beneficial to whoever you become or whoever you’re destined to become. At school we moved classes, so I got split up from my friends, but actually it turned out to be one of the best things that could’ve happened. I met so many new people who I feel really changed my life. People come into your life for a reason, because of fate.The book makes you feel less alone. It opens the walls of the boxes we all trade our language and emotions in and lets us travel among ourselves." — Max Porter