IRA MATHUR
Amanda Smyth writes between islands. Born in Ireland to a Trinidadian mother and Irish father, she belongs to both places—and neither entirely. Now based in Leamington Spa, she teaches creative writing at Arvon, Skyros in Greece, and Coventry University.
Smyth’s debut, Black Rock (Serpants Tail 2009), set in 1950s Trinidad, won the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger, was an Oprah Summer Read, and received nominations for the NAACP Image Award and the McKitterick Prize. Fortune (Peepal Tree Press 2021), which takes place during Trinidad’s oil boom, was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.
Smyth’s new book, Look At You, (Peepal Tree Press 2025) is a novel in stories. A girl moves between Trinidad, England, and Ireland, trying to understand where she fits, and how to stay upright in a family split down invisible lines.
The stories linger in moments of waiting, in what remains unsaid. The prose is deliberately spare and attentive, holding tension in the pauses and silences. Smyth writes “to understand what I think and feel”. Writing, she says, gives back what you give it.
Each story reads like a held breath.
Claire Adam calls it “delicate, beautiful, intensely moving. Her best yet”. Chloe Aridjis writes: “Through a succession of vignettes that quietly build and blossom, Amanda Smyth has created a marvellous tapestry of a novel.” Paul Murray calls it “hypnotic and heartbreaking”. Monique Roffey: “A remarkable novel. I loved it.”
Smyth has written all her life. “Particularly when I was younger, and my heart was tangled up in places I couldn’t figure out.” Journals turned into poems, and poems into stories. She writes when something “detonates” inside her and also when nothing seems to happen at all.
Smyth’s process is slow, deliberate. “I procrastinate. I check the laundry. I stare inside the fridge.” She remembers Wayne Brown’s writing sessions in Normandie, where even the great pauses—food, walking, silence—formed part of the rhythm. “There was always a discussion about diet or what we’d all been eating—the fridge. Who was walking, who was needing to walk. It made me laugh, but it was true.”
Now, she writes in what she calls her “little writing cave”, a small room with a heater on and the lamp always lit. “Here, I enjoy getting lost for a few hours.”
The following excerpt from Amanda Smyth’s Look At You is published with permission of the author and Peepal Tree Press. It captures the atmospheric clarity of Smyth’s work, where memory, place, and voice come together in prose that neither strains nor explains.
EXCERPT FROM LOOK AT YOU
Used with permission of the author and Peepal Tree Press.
“I liked to watch her face breaking through the surface in the pool—the big blue pool at the club where I played every day during summer holidays. Helena, my grandmother’s helper, sat beneath the coloured parasol while I swam with my brother, Simon, and the other children who lived on the refinery camp: swam, ran about on the hot concrete, and threw coins in the water and dived down to find them, and jumped from the tall diving board.
From there I could see the refinery, the burning lilac flame. I could see the dark green places full of bamboo bushes. I could see the shimmering lake and the brown bank where the vultures made a black crowd. Before we hit the water, we yelled out our names or the name of someone famous who we’d like to be. Sometimes we screamed because the diving board was a skyscraper and the pool below a faraway city.
Helena would look up from her Bible and say, Stop that noise, be quiet. And we’d stop for a while, but then someone would throw a coin into the pool, or push someone in, and we’d start shouting again. This would go on all day, until we were told to come for lunch or it was time to go home. By afternoon, my skin was wrinkled like an old person’s, not like a young girl’s at all.
I knew she was older, by at least three years. Mostly, she sat in her orange bikini in a wrought-iron chair, her legs propped on another, reading a book. Sometimes she walked to the edge of the pool, made a steeple with her hands, and dived in. Or she swam to the other side—or to the other side and back again. But she never stayed in the pool for long. If we were playing in the deep end, she swam in the shallow. And if we were playing in the shallow end, she swam where the water was deep.
Her name was Ann Sanchez. I would never have spoken to her if I hadn’t found her necklace. I was looking for a ten cent piece when I saw it lying on the grate at the bottom of the pool. I knew it didn’t belong to any of us. When I held it up, it sparkled in the sun. Someone said I should keep it. I didn’t know what to do. Simon thought I should ask Helena or take it home and ask our mother.
Then I saw her standing by her chair. One hand made a shade over her eyes, the other held on to her hip. Her skin shone like liquorice.
“Hold on a minute,” I said to the others, and climbed out of the water. She wrapped a towel around her waist and walked towards me. When I asked if the chain was hers, she looked in the cup of my hand and cocked her head like a bird.
“I’ve been looking for that for the longest while.”
Her voice was soft, tinkling and gentle, like the voice of a stream if a stream could speak. When I dropped the chain into her hand, her full mouth suddenly grew wide in a smile, and I thought how large her white teeth were. I was about to go back to the shallow end when she asked where I was from.
When I told my mother I had met a girl called Ann at the pool, she asked, as they always ask in Trinidad, if I knew the family name.
“Sanchez,” I said.
My mother and grandmother spent the whole evening talking about the Sanchez family they had known when my mother was a child.
So I heard about Mona with the Coca-Cola figure who won a competition for the most beautiful girl in south Trinidad. I heard about Mona’s uncle, a teacher who never got married. I heard about her father, who was killed in an automobile accident, and how her mother tried to kill herself by hanging from a light fitting, but someone heard the chair fall and the rope broke because it was old and frayed. I heard about her mother’s lover who lived in Barbados and how he took all her money and threw it away in a fast food restaurant.
This is what happens in Trinidad. You say one name and, next thing, they’re talking about the family for hours.”
–End of Excerpt
Smyth sees writing as a kind of barter: what you surrender, it returns—if you’re lucky. That exchange anchors Look At You, a book marked by spare, watchful clarity.
Ira Mathur is a freelance journalist, a Guardian Media columnist and the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction.
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