The Gatekeepers brings book deal for Trini writer Lloyd

BEFORE she started writing The Gatekeepers, Trinidad-born, UK-based writer Ayanna Gillian Lloyd spent a lot of time in cemeteries and was always struck, “by the way Lapeyrouse Cemetery (Port of Spain) in particular was a history lesson – a little city within a city, a world of its own.”

She said the idea for her debut novel, The Gatekeepers, grew out of “thinking through the ways that we live with death and how our cultural deathways hold (or hide) important histories.”

The Gatekeepers' synopsis reads: “Darwin is a down-on-his-luck gravedigger, newly arrived in the city, struggling to hold onto his Rastafarian faith, young and beautiful and lost. Yejide is trying to grieve her mother while coming to terms with the legacy that has now passed on to her: the power to talk to the dead. They will find one another in Port Angeles, where the dead lie uneasy and where trouble is brewing…”

The novel was acquired by British publishing house Hamish Hamilton and will appear in 2022. The North American rights were sold first, with Doubleday winning the rights to publish in the US and Bond Street Books in Canada.

“There have also been additional translation deals since then, so it will also be published in Brazil, the Netherlands and Lithuania so far and still going. It’s still all quite surreal,” Lloyd said.

She joins Jamaican writer Marlon James as one of Hamish Hamilton's authors. The company also publishes Indian author Arundhati Roy, US linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky and UK novelist Zadie Smith, among others.

Before going to the UK, Lloyd taught for a long time and also worked in advertising and corporate communications. It took her three to four years to complete the novel, which began as a short story in TT in 2017. The story then travelled with her to her first workshop at the University of East Anglia’s (UEA) masters programme in creative writing in 2017.

“I spent that academic year (2017-2018) figuring out how to grow it into a novel. Then I got into the PhD programme, also at UEA, and had to divide my time between focusing on that research and accompanying book project while redrafting The Gatekeepers.

“That part was hard. Like going to sleep in one world and waking up in another and having to remember the rules for the new place all the time. I ‘finished’ it at the end of 2019 and then really finished it in 2020 with lots of gaps and stops and starts in between,” she said in e-mail responses to Newsday.

Lloyd grew up among a family of readers, storytellers and music-makers in Diego Martin in the 80s and was always making things up. But it was through the Bocas Lit Fest that she found a path to writing books and publishing them. Through the festival, she met other writers and joined workshops like the St James Writers Room, the Cropper Foundation, Mentoring with the Masters and Callaloo. She had the opportunity to work with great Caribbean writers and really learn how it’s done, she added.

Lloyd only began thinking about writing as something she could do with her life around 2012/2013 and began submitting work to journals and competitions in 2014.

“I have had a long lead-up. It helps to grow up in TT, though. You’re just surrounded by stories. Just look around, listen, pay attention. Reality beats fiction every time.”

She drew her inspiration for the novel from myth, magic and folklore.

“I like looking for bits of the spectral, the uncanny and the powerful that hide in plain sight in our everyday lives. I wanted to create a world that felt like parts of Trinidad but with the volume turned up – an alternative version.”

Lloyd said so much good happened for her personally in the midst of a terrible cloud of death, global uncertainty, fear and worry with the covid19 pandemic.

She loves grand epic narratives, family histories and stories that, “make (the) everyday seem touched by magic and the bigness of myth.”

Books that do things with form or language that are unexpected or which makes her think about the world in ways she hadn’t before intrigue her.

“I especially love when as a writer I read something, and my eyes open wide like whoa! I didn’t know you could do that!”

For Lloyd, many of the writers Hamish Hamilton publishes do all of the above.

In an article in thebookseller.com, Hermione Thompson, an editor at Hamish Hamilton, said her work is in conversation with Roy, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Toni Morrison and Jean Rhys.

“I first read Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things at maybe 18 or 19 and remained loving it with such intense passion long after I forgot the details. But the lush, grand bigness of it and how it made me feel as a young reader was something I’ll always remember,” she said, talking of writers she admired and why.

She also counts British author Bernardine Evaristo among those she admires – for her books, her long career and for being such a great literary citizen and tireless activist.

James is also among them. She said she loved his fearless voice since John Crow's Devil. She also loves Smith and Scottish author Ali Smith and British novelist and poet Deborah Levy.

“And on the US side Doubleday publishes Colson Whitehead, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, whose work I’ve loved in different measures over the years – I’m newer to Colson Whitehead’s work, and so glad I got there. And of course, Toni Morrison is god. You can't tell me different.”

Hamish Hamilton is also set to publish Lloyd’s second novel, Dark Eye Place, in 2024. Lloyd said Dark Eye Place will be set in the same fictional world as The Gatekeepers, an imagined TT.

It tells the story of a house, the family who built it and the woman who inherits it.

“Lots of family secrets, old lovers, dead people who refuse to stay dead and one very own-way pothound,” she added.

After all the hype, Lloyd simply wants people to love the book and she hopes TT readers feel, in some way, that it was written for them.

“Also, buy books! Buy Caribbean books. Read them, give them to your friends and loved ones. Make libraries cool.”