Writing, Reading, Wo/andering
This story was inspired by Pontormo’s Annunciation in the church of Santa Felicita in Florence. It was painted 1527-8, during a time of crisis in Italy after the collapse of the lengthy peace engineered by Cosimo de Medici.
The Italian republics, until recently the cultural and financial heart of Europe, were being subdued one by one by foreign powers.
This story, which won the Young Walter Scott Prize 2019, was inspired by folk songs from the north-east of England – about the sea, Arctic whaling, and the press-gang. These set me reading nineteenth-century collections of songs, stories and poems in the dialect of Whitby and the North Riding. I was captivated by suggestive and onomatopoeic but now forgotten words and turns of phrase. The words had mostly Norse roots, and I realised that the dialect, like the weather and livelihoods of the people of this coast, had drifted to Whitby by sea from the far north.