Diego Garcia

Edinburgh, 2014. Two writer friends, Damaris and Oliver Pablo, escape London, the city that killed his brother. They spend their days trying to get to the library, bickering over their tanking bitcoin, failing to write or resist the sadness. Then they meet Diego, a poet. He tells them he is named for his mother’s island in the Chagos Archipelago, which she and her community were forced to leave by British soldiers in 1973. Damaris and Oliver Pablo become obsessed with this notorious episode and the continuing resistance of the Chagossian people, and want to write in solidarity. But how to share a story that is not theirs to tell? And how to account for a loss not theirs to grieve? A tragicomedy interrogating the powers of literature alongside the crimes of the British government, Diego Garcia is a collaborative fiction that opens up possibilities for the novel and seeks other ways of living together.

‘Intimate yet expansive, heartbroken but unbowed, and a book about writing that is anything but solipsistic, it’s a stirring novel that lights a way forward for politically conscious fiction.’
— Anthony Cummins, Observer

‘As an experiment in “fictive criticism”, this is a new type of social novel, one that avoids stable conclusions. Instead it demands the reader’s own critique.’
— Gurnaik Johal, TLS

‘As one digs further into Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams’ beguiling, wilfully disjointed quasi-novel Diego Garcia, certain details begin to link together, even as the form becomes stranger and less linear.… There is a prevalent sense of mild interior-life chaos, simmering anger at spiteful injustice, and the feeling that events herein are profoundly real, perhaps because they are.’
— Noel Gardner, Buzz Magazine

Natasha Soobramanien, British-Mauritian, and Luke Williams, Scottish, are the authors of Genie and Paul and The Echo Chamber, respectively. They used to live in Edinburgh but Natasha now lives in Brussels and Luke in Cove. Diego Garcia won the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize.