The Distance Between Us

Multi-award-winning novelists Carys Davies and Jon McGregor reflect on the human impulse to connect and tell our stories – even when words fail us. Through the prism of Davies’ latest novel, Clear, they will explore solitary landscapes, hidden selves and the intricacies of language.

Carys Davies’s debut novel West was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and her second novel The Mission House was The Sunday Times 2020 Novel Of The Year. Her highly anticipated third novel, Clear, is a Shetland-set historical drama about the connections forged between strangers, and is a love letter to landscape, hope and human relationships. It is a Sunday Times Best Book of 2024, a BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick, and a Waterstyones Book You Need to Read in 2024.

Carys will be joined in conversation by award-winning author and short story writer Jon McGregor. His latest novel Lean Fall Stand delivers a profoundly humane and engrossing exploration of an Antarctic researcher brought low by tragedy and desperate to communicate with the outside world. 

Biographies

Carys Davies’s debut novel West was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, longlisted for the European Literature Prize, Runner Up for the Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize, and winner of the Wales Book of the Year for Fiction. Her second novel The Mission House was The Sunday Times 2020 Novel Of The Year.

She is also the author of two collections of short stories, Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike, which won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. She is the recipient of the Royal Society of Literature’s V.S. Pritchett Prize, the Society of Authors’ Olive Cook Short Story Award, a Northern Writers’ Award, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Folio Academy.