Charlie Porter has been named among the most influential fashion journalists of his time, British or otherwise. He started his career as a researcher at the Daily Express in the 1990s. He published two non-fiction books about fashion with Penguin, What Artists Wear in 2021 and Bring No Clothes in 2023.
Nova Scotia House is his striking debut novel. Johnny mourns his friend and lover Gerry. Gerry died of Aids more than two decades ago. But Johnny is newly troubled because a new-build tower is rising, and will soon obstruct the light Gerry loved in their garden. The story is delicately orchestrated such that Johnny suffers a triplicate grief. He has lost Gerry. As he reaches the age Gerry died at, he loses Gerry as an older mentor figure. And as he reaches the year when Gerry might have died of natural causes, he loses Gerry as a love who should still be with him. Porter wields a turbulent stream-of-consciousness first-person narrative to balance these and many other emotions.
George Monaghan: The Goldsmiths Prize was set up to reward fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”. What can an “innovative” approach offer the reader (and writer) that a more conventional novel might not?
Charlie Porter: I think that writing is about reading. The two are together and the reader should be invited to be active in reading. Writing can be: “I am telling you something. Shut up.” I’m never interested in producing that writing in any form. As a writer in any form, I’ve always been thinking about the active engagement of the reader. When writing becomes rote, as in formulaic or assumed or following a trodden path, I think that this immediately puts the reader in a passive place. The reader wasn’t given a chance to think, “Hey, I want something different.” Then the reader might think, “Oh, this is what reading is meant to be then. I’m meant to just accept this.” I think that actually it’s the responsibility of writers, should they realise it, to make reading an active experience. What I mean by active experience can be just as simple as the brain having to work. By something as simple as it not necessarily being clear where a sentence will end. In writing that is “by rote”, you can often see where a sentence will end. Particularly if it’s cliché. A reader’s brain can switch off and not be working while reading. In conversation, the brain has to be working. I think it’s trying to mimic an approach to life where the brain has to keep working.
Tell me about a piece of art, literature or music that was important to you when writing this book.
The only real moment in the book is my visit to the UK Aids memorial quilt in 2021. It’s interesting because when I went to see the quilt for the first time, I wasn’t necessarily thinking about it in terms of art. I was thinking about it in terms of protest or memorial. But then this year we got the quilt into the Tate Modern, into the Turbine Hall. And it was extraordinary to see the entire quilt in the Turbine Hall, and to realise it is a memorial and a protest and also art, and for it to allow itself to really be seen in that context; in a context it had never really be seen before, and then to rethink what we consider as art.
If you ever read back a page and felt it wasn’t inviting the reader enough, how would you set about editing it?
I would hope not to write a page that was like that. The work is word by word. The books are written: every word counts, then every sentence, then every paragraph. A lot of my training on how to think about process was through my nan and making pastry and cakes. She taught me to make pastry. She lived her whole life in Wellingborough. She loved lard, so it was lard pastry. Eight ounces of flour, four ounces of lard, splash of water, pinch of salt. But from the beginning you have to be light with your fingers, or it won’t make good pastry. So she really taught me from the first point of making, just be light with it.
So you’re trying to be artistic from the beginning? There’s no splurging it out to start?
No, but then there is rigorous – really rigorous – editing. From myself and then in dialogue with my editor. And every word is tested. The whole thing is tested.
What grounds might a word fail its test on?
Words stand for something, and so it’s trying to say the word that is as close to the thing that it’s trying to convey. Or the combination of words, or the connection between words, or the jolt that snaps something into life. Whether a sentence is breathing, whether there’s movement in the sentence, whether it feels right or not. I don’t have many complex words. I don’t ever want to write in an exclusionary way. What’s that Philip Seymour Hoffman film Synecdoche? I don’t ever want to write with that sort of word that I don’t really know what it means. So the words are quite clear but they’re very specific.
What about the use of the word “honest” in the book? It’s not used in just the common usage. But in the book, a piece of furniture can be honest, or a way of living can be honest. And it also seems Johnny understands Jerry’s ethic as honesty. What is it that you’re honest to and honest about?
That’s really interesting because “honest” really can be a difficult word, and a word that lies as well. They’re complex words. But actually in this particular case, the book is talking about a particular period of repression for queer people, after centuries of repression. It’s set in the present day. Looking back to the early 1990s. And Jerry, who’s the older character, he’s looking back to the 1960s and 1970s. The book is attempting to express what it’s like, what it was like, and what it still is like in some ways to grow up with repression of the self as assumed as something that you will accept, that you will do to become part of society. You will repress yourself and then you can become part of society. That’s what I grew up within. I became a teenager in the 1980s and so my cultural reference is those that repress themselves to be accepted or those that tried to stand against and then were shunned or were outcast or were living within counterculture. And so the use of the word honest is an attempt to see what it’s like if humans are just themselves. The reason behind writing fiction rather than non-fiction was about trying to get to them. Because the thing about writing non-fiction about that period is that you’re doing it through veils: layers of homophobia, repression. So much of the source material written in that time period has got a layer of homophobia about it; like all media has got a layer of homophobia about it. People’s own personal journals have got traces of them having to repress themselves. And I wanted to actually get to the people.
The words “queer” and “straight” are used beyond sexuality. It also seems that straight means the straightforward way through life and queer is everywhere else imaginable. Society never sits you down and says “look here are all the other ways”, you have to break out consciously. Would you restructure that?
I was already at school, already a teenager, when Section 28 [of the Local Government Act 1988] came in. And it’s so strange to think about. Would there have been anyone at school if Section 28 hadn’t come in that would have possibly been able to say to me, “Hey, why don’t you look at this, why don’t you look at that?” I also wish that those that then went on to live heteronormative lives had been offered a chance to think about their lives in ways that were open. It can seem overwhelming, which is why the book has got community and volunteering and things like that at its heart to suggest other ways that we can educate ourselves through creating societies where community action is happening that young people can grow up in and see other ways, the stuff that I won’t be able to change.
Why do we need the Goldsmiths Prize?
I’ve never been shortlisted for anything in my life, ever. Maybe a fake journalism award. I’m 52 this month and so for my first experience to be for something with meaning is just the most extraordinary feeling. It’s so generative for me, it’s been so good for me; for my work, since it’s so thrilling. The word novel means new. It’s a really simple action, it’s really clear and it’s really powerful.
What past British or Irish novel deserves a retrospective Goldsmiths Prize?
Lanark by Alasdair Gray.
“Nova Scotia House” by Charlie Porter is published by Particular Books. The winner of the 2025 Goldsmiths Prize is announced on 5 November. Read more interviews with the shortlisted writers here.
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