An Equal Stillness

JENNET MALLOW is a fictional artist whose biography An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay won this year’s new writers Orange Award.

Kay’s debut novel is a narrative feat worthy of its trophy that explores the artistic inclination against familial obligations and the pursuit of love.

Born in 1924 in South Yorkshire to a war-shocked father and a disillusioned mother, Jennet shows her artistic leanings at an early age. Escaping the unhappy home she takes a place at Oxford but, finding it oppressive, flees to Cornwall to work on a farm. Here she starts to christen “the sea and sky with their precise richness of colour – turquoise, azure, sapphire” and for her it is like learning a new language, “the only way she could say out loud what she knew was worth the saying”.