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Shola von Reinhold is a Scottish writer. Her debut novel, LOTE (2020), was published by Jacaranda Books during the publisher's #Twentyin2020 campaign, an initiative to "publish 20 titles by 20 Black British writers in one year".[1] LOTE won the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Memorial Prize.
LOTE 's protagonist Mathilda Adamarola sets out to recover "forgotten artistic and literary figures of the past", whom she calls "Transfixions”.[2][3]
Mathilda's "Transfixions" include real and fictional figures, including "1920s aesthete and socialite Stephen Tennant and the Bright Young Things", and Roberte Horth, an early 20th century writer from French Guiana who lived in Paris.[3] In the National Portrait Gallery archive, Mathilda encounters Hermia Druitt, a Black Scottish poet.[4] Mathilda's approach to understanding Druitt's life and work relates to processes of "literary recovery" practiced by "feminist scholars in the 1970s and 1980s who sought to correct the male biases of the British literary canon."[2]
In the novel, decadence, glamour or luxury are forms of "resistance [...] an opposition to the Whiteness that has always told Black people that they are too ornamented",[3][5][6] with the protagonists identifying how "this prejudice has its roots in colonialist contempt for African culture".[7]
