Weird homemaking: precarious geographies of home in British storytelling

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Contemporary British storytelling is shifting away from Western paradigms of safe and bounded homes. From the established (Maggie Gee, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith) to the emergent (Natasha Brown, Jo Hamya ,Melody Razak), writers are increasingly drawn to precarious urban home imaginaries. Literary novels disturb the discrete modern home through 'weird' ecological ruptures in urban space (Morton 2016); oral testimonies on displacement rewrite processes of homemaking, bringing the outside in; life writing on council estates and the Grenfell Tower Inquiry reveal the precarity of contemporary British homes. This interdisciplinary project situates itself at an intersection between the ethical turn in literary studies and the creative turn in geography (Stonebridge 2018; Hawkins 2019). Creative geographies have explored the multiple scales of home in visual culture (Sheringham et al. 2020) but not in contemporary literatures of "weird homemaking", which is where my project intervenes.