Jacqueline Crooks: The books behind her novel 'Sky City'
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- Jacqueline Crooks credits Toni Morrison's novels — The Bluest Eye, Tar Baby, and Jazz — with showing her that Black lives from marginalised worlds are worthy of being centred in literature, the influence that 'made me want to find my own' voice
- Crooks' forthcoming novel 'Sky City' draws on Alice Coltrane's music, and she is currently reading Andy Beta's 'Cosmic Music: The Life, Art and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane' to inform its rhythm and pace
- Wilson Harris' Guyanese landscapes, when Crooks returned to his work in her 40s, taught her that landscape can carry history, memory, and imagination — a lesson she applied to placing Jamaica's landscapes on the page
- Crooks was given 'The Water-Babies' by Charles Kingsley at age eight, after being moved from her grandmother's care to live with her mother and her husband, a story about 'leaving one world, adapting to another' that 'developed my survival imagination'
- Emily Brontë's 'Wuthering Heights', which Crooks read at 12 or 13, taught her that 'landscape is character,' shaping her lasting attraction to 'unknowable characters and psychologically alive places'
- Crooks discovered Xiaolu Guo's 'Radical' in 2023, praising its 'fierce independence' in combining memoir, philosophy, visual art and Chinese script to depict a woman stepping outside prescribed roles
Why it matters: Jacqueline Crooks, author of the story collection 'The Ice Migration,' reveals the literary DNA of her forthcoming novel 'Sky City' — a book shaped by Alice Coltrane's spiritual music, Jamaica's landscapes (via Wilson Harris), and Morrison's model of centering marginalised Black lives. For readers of Black diaspora literature, the interview maps the preoccupations driving her next work before it reaches shelves.
