Sarah Watling is the author of
The Olivier Sisters, for which she was awarded the Tony Lothian Prize. She holds degrees from the University of Cambridge and the University of London and was a 2020 Silvers Grant recipient.
Watling's new book is
Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Writers, Outsiders, and the Spanish Civil War.
At the
Guardian she tagged
ten neglected books about the Spanish Civil War, including:
Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas
This magnificent “true tale” follows a stalled novelist who becomes obsessed in the 1990s with the story of the falangist writer
Rafael Sánchez Mazas and his escape from a Republican firing squad, thanks to a Republican soldier who spared his life. It’s a quest through archival scraps and oral history, one that demonstrates how our histories and legends are an accumulation of stories. It may start with Mazas, but the narrator’s encounter with Miralles, a forgotten Republican militiaman who went on to fight fascism in the second world war, forms the heart of the novel – and reminds us that injustices live on in the way different individuals and accounts are memorialised.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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