I remember reading this story as an anonymous submission to the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize in early 2019, and just thinking that this was exactly the sort of thing that I was looking for in new fiction. The story an obvious choice for our shortlist that year, and was one of the winners when that list went to our panel of judges. ‘The Arcadian’ features the Utopian, Henrik, who is fascinated with the future, and the Arcadian, Bim, who is drawn to the past. Beginning with a meeting in a 19th Edinburgh hotel bar, the intellectual and sensual interplay between the two characters mediates a narrative gliding through a series of points – Blackness and femininity, gender and androgyny, what becomes history, otherness and sexuality. It ends with a discussion of a painting, specifically whether the Black figures in the painting would have been real models living in Edinburgh in the 19th century. This story is told with incredible lyrical beauty, and perhaps a sense of ambiguity. Six years on and I’m still thinking about it, and when we were putting 22 Fictions, it was the first story on my list. Like Shola’s award-winning novel LOTE, it’s a work of sublime brilliance, and again, is something that creates its own form.
Read online in Hotel / Tenement Press. Collected in 22 Fictions, CHEERIO, 2025.
A Personal Anthology 