Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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Lying in bed, Vasya described to his wife how the roof of the power plant had been covered in burning bitumen: it was “like walking on hot tar. It is told by Lyudmila, who had, at the time of the explosion, recently married Vasily, “Vasya,” a firefighter. Where he describes how a bomb’s physical effects are held in the atmosphere, Luftkrieg could also be taken to mean war in the air. All of these things are continuous in a world that also contains the bitumen that stuck to Vasya’s boots, the cesium 137 and tellurium 132 that were released from the No. One memorable conversation I had was with somebody who works for Amnesty, who is creating a report into the bombing of the theatre in Mariupol in Ukraine – and she was talking about how they work out what kinds of explosives went off, what happened in the theatre, what happened to the people in the basement, etcetera.

It was useful in a practical way to learn to be more patient (with my own writing, as well as with other people’s), and to take pleasure in different kinds of books. Daisy Hildyard is the author of the novels Emergency and Hunters in the Snow, which received the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards.It can feel impossible, as an individual, to decelerate or exit the systems that make all this happen. Bodies starve for breath underwater and melt in extraordinary heat; chromosomes are pulled apart by radiation. When the huge black rabbit who lived in a run in our garden had a nest full of babies, my parents had told me not to touch them. Many speakers discussed how they couldn’t see or feel any change as the radiation pervaded their environment and their own bodies.

Firefighters, soldiers, and volunteers began the attempt to put out fires, to seal the leak, and to clean up.She is nearing completion of a PhD on early modern scientific literature at Queen Mary, University of London, where she has been awarded the Marjorie Thompson Prize and the Drapers’ Company Postgraduate Prize. In her latest novel Emergency (2022), Daisy Hildyard rethinks what an emergency is through stories about dissolving boundaries in rural Yorkshire, while also reinventing the pastoral novel for the era of the Anthropocene.