The Precarious Writing of Ann Quin

Ann Quin’s innovative, versatile oeuvre made a vital contribution to 1960s and ’70s British experimental writing. While contemporaries praised her vivid and energetic prose, a sustained and in-depth study of Quin has so far been absent from scholarly reassessment of this literary era. As the first comprehensive appraisal of her writing and life, this book redresses that critical neglect, aims to recuperate Quin as a key female experimental writer of the twentieth century, shows how the precarious possibility of her writing is its essential attribute, and demonstrates the lasting importance of her work. Its combination of scholarly analysis and archival expertise investigates her life, writing and forms of experimentation to convey precisely what is striking and significant about Quin.

Nonia Williams is a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. Recent publications include ’(Re)turning to Quin: An Introduction’ in Women: A Cultural Review (2022); ’＂Designing its Own Shadow＂ tracing Ann Quin’s reiterative experimental processes’ (2021); ’About/Of Madness: Ann Quin’s The Unmapped Country’ in Textual Practice (2020) and British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s (EUP, 2019).