This is the Place to Be

Lara Pawson’s This Is the Place to Be is a stark, compassionate and troubling text that summons a fragmentary autobiography, circling experiences from her growing up in England and her time as a reporter covering civil wars in Angola and Ivory Coast. She deals with big questions through an intimate mosaic of lived experiences – the blank, funny, awful, gentle shards that remain in memory years after events have taken place – returning her again and again to the themes of identity, violence, race, class, sexuality and the everyday lives of people across several continents.

‘This is an explosive book encapsulating the kind of innovation that is characteristic of the contemporary small press scene. Despite her assertion that “I don’t feel brave, I feel angry”, Pawson demonstrates a courageous lack of self-censure and an unflinching desire to reveal all, resulting in an intensely powerful and compelling read.’ – Becky Danks, Contemporary Small Press

‘It is elegant, profound, candid, affecting and funny.’ – Houman Barekat, Times Literary Supplement

‘Brilliant and uncompromising.’  – Jonathan Gibbs, Guardian

‘It’s so compulsive I couldn’t stop reading it, loving almost every line. It’s an act of generosity …  I cannot recommend it more highly. It’s just wonderful.’ – Neil Griffiths

‘Lara Pawson’s lucid, sudden and subtle memoir unpicks the spirals of memory, politics, violence, to trace the boundaries and crossing points of gender and race identity.’ – Joanna Walsh

‘A crushingly honest memoir of war, war correspondence and personal mayhem … Her focus is direct, bleakly honest, and as a result full of hope.’ – M. John Harrison

‘This Is the Place To Be is principally a moving meditation on whether [the author] can trust her sense of belonging at the time or her sadness afterwards and on whether the violence of war can be separated from a strain of violence that seems more endemic to human life.’ – Lara Feigel, Times Literary Supplement

‘Lara Pawson’s This Is the Place to Be is a stark, compassionate and troubling text that summons a fragmentary autobiography, circling experiences from her growing up in England and her time as a reporter covering civil wars in Angola and Ivory Coast. She deals with big questions through an intimate mosaic of lived experiences – the blank, funny, awful, gentle shards that remain in memory years after events have taken place – returning her again and again to the themes of identity, violence, race, class, sexuality and the everyday lives of people across several continents.’  – Tim Etchells

‘The personal anecdotes and childhood vignettes that are interspersed among the wartime reminiscences occur in such locales as Sheen and Weybridge – middle-class suburban towns in the South East of England. The juxtaposition is jarring, the distance impossible to bridge. Pawson bemoans the suffocating compromises of professional journalism, the necessity of reducing everything to a hackneyed sound bite and the impossibility of transcending the limits of the format … For all its personal candor, the spare laconicism of Pawson’s prose – even when recalling harrowing acts of violence – militates against any sense of intrusiveness or therapeutic excess. The result is a sense of intimacy lightly worn; we are told a lot, but it doesn’t feel like a lot.’ – Houman Barekat, Los Angeles Review of Books

‘This original and challenging book is poetic in its structure and layering of ideas. Pawson challenges herself, our notion of the truth, history and memory, as she blends fragmented episodes of personal memoir with her time as a journalist, most notably as a war reporter in Angola.’ – Bernardine Evaristo

Lara Pawson lives in east London. She is the author of In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre (2014) and Spent Light (2024).

Lara Pawson's This Is the Place to Be is a stark, compassionate and troubling text that summons a fragmentary autobiography, circling experiences from her growing up in England and her time as a reporter covering civil wars in Angola and Ivory Coast. She deals with big questions through an intimate mosaic of lived experiences - the blank, funny, awful, gentle shards that remain in memory years after events have taken place - returning her again and again to the themes of identity, violence, race, class, sexuality and the everyday lives of people across several continents.

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