Biography
Manya Wilkinson is a Jewish New Yorker who has lived in the North of England for over twenty years. Formerly a senior MA lecturer on prose and scriptwriting at Newcastle University, she is currently teaching prose workshops for Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts and Mslexia magazine. Her first novel, Ocean Avenue, was published by Serpent’s Tail, and her short stories by Comma Press. Her radio dramas have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Afternoon Play, Saturday Drama, Writing the Century, and Woman’s Hour.
Photo credit: Christopher James Owens
Reviews
Neel Mukherjee
‘Manya Wilkinson has again, following in the footsteps of her previous Lublin, written a novel like no other. Lark is a (literal) dystopia of ageing and the end of life, voiced by an utterly original narrator: hilarious, delusional, vain, brittle, spunky, indomitable, unreliable, obsessed with good coffee, men, Chekhov, her hair. It is the funniest book you will read this year until you realise your hands are shaking with grief towards the end. It is nothing short of a masterpiece.’
Wingate Literary Prize Judges
‘Manya Wilkinson’s Lublin is marvellously impossible to categorise. At once personal and epic, on the surface it is a tale of three young friends setting off on an adventure. In a scant 200 pages it creates a portrait of the joys and costs of friendship, while also providing an effortless discourse on the history of Europe and European Jewry — one that also looks compellingly towards the future. Wilkinson’s language and imagery call up that of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholem Aleichem, Sam Beckett and Franz Kafka, yet it remains absolutely unique. This is a novel to press into the hands of strangers and exclaim, Read this book!’
Neel Mukherjee
New Statesman Books of the Year 2024
‘The best novel I read this year was Lublin by Manya Wilkinson. Part picaresque, part boys’ adventure story, part Freud’s joke book, part immersive dive into early-20th-century Jewish life in a Polish corner of the Russian empire, this funny and devastating novel is lucid, beautiful and utterly original. Where has this author been hiding all these years?’
Randy Boyagoda
New York Times
‘With its matter-of-fact approach to depicting antisemitic violence, its three guileless main characters and its artful folding-together of fable, history and Jewish joke-making, this is a story for the moment and for the ages [...] Lublin is more cogent and unflinching in its exploration of Jewish experience than Gyorgy Spiro’s sprawling historical novel Captivity, and also more moving than Cormac McCarthy’s alpha-male dystopia The Road in its rendering of ordinary human relationships pressured by imminent ruin.’
Kirkus Reviews
‘Elya is determined to make it to Lublin no matter the cost. His dark jokes provide some of the novel’s most powerful moments. Just as effective are the moments when the narrative jumps into the future to reveal villagers’ ultimate fates in a world moving fast toward the Holocaust […] A tale that uses humour to counterbalance tragedy asks if it’s too late to go back home.’
Zuzanna Lachendro
New Statesman
‘Manya Wilkinson dips into both the present and future, blending adventure with historical fiction to create a sharp, unique tale.’
Ian Sansom
Times Literary Supplement
‘Lublin is a mini masterpiece: simple, straightforward, narratologically complex, funny, sad and profoundly satisfying. If you read a finer novel this year – honestly, seriously? – well, lucky you.’
Jenni Frazer
Jewish Chronicle
‘A delicious little book.’
Max Gross
Jewish Book Council
‘What keeps Lublin from devolving into a mere wisecracking joke is the heft that’s given to the three main characters. [. . .] A subtle but powerful statement on that sad chapter of Jewish history.’
Giorgia Tolfo
Full Stop
‘Lublin is indeed like a dream. It is a city that never appears in the story, but that is constantly made “visible” by the desires of the boys trying to reach it. It is a city that disappears from the physical space inhabited by the boys to reappear in the reader’s hands as a map. It is a destination that dissolves into the desire for a destination and that become the universal symbol of any desired city.’
Nick Rennison
Sunday Times
‘Often very funny, this is an original, compelling work of fiction’.
Jacob Polley
‘Told against the engulfing dark of the 20th century, Lublin glitters with beauty, comedy and compassion. A glorious, ringing and resonating book by a master storyteller.’
David Almond
‘Lublin has a truly individual flavour. Beautifully written, well-paced, rhythmical, sad, funny. It was a real pleasure to read it.’
Sean O'Brien
‘Wilkinson is a superb comic writer. She’s also gifted in startling poetic compression, turning on a sixpence to move into moments of horror and prophecy. Reading Lublin, you have to laugh; you want to look away from what follows, but you can’t.’
Sinéad Morrissey
‘Mercurial, hilarious, terrifying, a sustained song to the lost, Lublin is a masterpiece. Prepare to be enchanted.’
Preti Taneja
‘A true boy's own adventure with a deep heart set against a backdrop of ferocious world events, Lublin will charm and devastate readers in equal measure with its compulsive, funny and moving prose. Manya Wilkinson has given us a fable-like story whose characters live and breathe through the ages to speak to us of childhood dreams and the inequities of war today.’
Praise for Manya Wilkinson’s Ocean Avenue
‘With a wry wit that recalls Woody Allen, Wilkinson confidently and evocatively blends the historical and personal into a disturbing yet funny tale.’ Publishers Weekly