Missouri Williams

The Doloriad opens in a ruined hospital outside Prague, some years after an unexplained catastrophe, where a single extended family lives under a woman known as the Matriarch. It was the debut of Missouri Williams, born in 1992 and settled in the Czech capital. Dead Ink Books issued it in Britain in 2022 and MCD x FSG in America. It took the Republic of Consciousness Prize, made the Sunday Times and Vulture books of the year, and took a place on the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award shortlist. Critics reached for Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy and László Krasznahorkai to describe the long coiling sentences, while Publishers Weekly predicted readers would either love the book or refuse it outright. Williams edits the feminist film journal Another Gaze, and her essays have run in The Nation, The Baffler and Granta, including a piece on the way temporal lobe seizures shaped her writing. In 2015 she wrote and directed King Lear with Sheep, a staging performed largely by sheep.