In his Booker-longlisted debut, the London author produced a double-dose adrenaline shot of violence, brotherhood and fuck-you swagger, based squarely on his own experiences as a younger man. The novel shook Britain’s literary establishment, heralding the emergence of a vital new voice. So, as the 34-year-old gears up to throw himself into the follow-up, it begs the question: where does he go next?
Text: Michael Fordham – Photography: Dan Wilton
THE WOMAN WEARS A BLUE DRESS. She holds the naked man down on the bed: his knees are drawn up, his head is braced upward, he looks toward us, inverted. Another woman, by her left side, takes the man’s hair in her left hand. With her right arm she wields a short sword, tip pointed downward. She draws the blade toward her. It cuts through the man’s neck. Blood runs down through his beard and onto the bed sheets. The light bathes the scene in a sepulchral glow. The executioners’ faces are vengeful and calm.
“Artemisia Gentileschi was raped as a young girl,” says novelist Gabriel Krauze, handing me the phone to show me the image. “You can see the pain and the suffering and the rage in this work.” Gabriel looks at my face as I stare at the screen. Caravaggio painted the same biblical scene 100 years earlier, but the maestro’s version does not have the same feeling. “Look at the viciousness here, look at the sense of revenge infused in this version – you’ve never heard of Gentileschi, because she is a woman,” he says, taking the phone back and sitting down on the sofa. “You’ve heard of Caravaggio. You’ve heard of Leonardo. But so many stories are never going to be told. So many experiences are never going to be shared.”
Gabriel Krauze writes seldom-told stories in a language that is rarely aired. He does this freehand in A4 card-bound notebooks – there is a stack of them waiting to be populated on his writing desk where we sit. There is an iMac there too, but it sits silent in a corner. Gabriel’s head, usually shaved, is wrapped in a lockdown bandana. London hums around his flat, which sits in a Victorian estate 100 metres from the river. “People in the literary world, like in the art world, think they want authenticity,” he says. “But when they get it, they discover that they don’t really want authenticity. Authenticity means truth. That’s what I’m trying to write. The truth.”
Six months previously, I met the 34-year-old for the first time in another part of London – the split-level yard on the South Kilburn estate where much of the action within his autobiographical first novel, Who They Was, takes place. It was a
