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Haweswater
- Author: Sarah Hall
- Category: Fiction
- Publisher: Faber(UK)
- Pub date: 1 August 2002
- Length: 267 pages
About Haweswater
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel 2002
‘First impression: here is a new writer of show-stopping genius; everyone should buy this novel… I stand by my original impressions. Go forth and buy; prepare to weep’
— GUARDIAN
It is 1936 in a remote dale in the old, northern county of Westmorland. For centuries the rural community has remained the same, the Lightburn family have been immersed in the harsh hill-farming tradition. Then a man from the city of Manchester arrives, spokesman for a vast industrial project that will devastate both the landscape and the local community. Mardale will be flooded to create a new reservoir, supplying water to the Midland cities. In the coming year this corner of Lakeland will be evacuated and transformed.
Jack Liggett, the waterworks’ representative, further compounds the problems faced by the village as he begins a troubled affair with Janet Lightburn. A woman of force and strength of mind, she has a natural orthodoxy that deeply influences him. Finally, in tragic circumstances, a remarkable, desperate act on Janet’s part attempts to restore the valley to its former state.
Told in luminous prose with an intuitive sense for period and place, HAWESWATER remembers a rural England that has been disappearing for decades, and introduces a young storyteller of great imaginative and emotional power.
About the Author
Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974. She received a BA from Aberystwyth University, Wales, and a MLitt in Creative Writing from St Andrews, Scotland. She is the author of Haweswater, which won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel, a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award, and a Lakeland Book of the Year prize.
In 2004, her second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia region), and the Prix Femina Etranger, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Her third novel, The Carhullan Army, was published in 2007, and won the 2006/07 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, a Lakeland Book of the Year prize, was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction and long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC award. It was chosen as one of the Times Best 100 Books of the Decade.
Her fourth novel, How To Paint A Dead Man, was published in 2009. It was longlisted for the Man Booker prize in the same year and won the Portico Prize in 2010. Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. She is working on a fifth novel and a collection of short stories.
Sarah Hall is an honorary fellow of Aberystwyth University, and a fellow of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation (2007). She was a member of Art Council England, North-West region 2008-2009. She regularly tutors for the Faber Academy, the Arvon Foundation, and has taught creative writing in a variety of establishments in the UK and abroad. She currently lives in Cumbria.