John Boyne

With me on this episode of Writers at Work is John Boyne, whose audacious new novel is THE WEIGHT OF ANGELS. I'll get to what makes it so in a few minutes. Raised in Dublin, John is the author of some twenty novels, including six for young readers.

It's likely you've heard of his 2006, THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS, a fable of the Holocaust. It tells of a son of an SS officer who befriends a Jewish boy who is a prisoner in a concentration camp. A film of the same name based on John's book appeared in 2008. John's novel, A LADDER TO THE SKY, was named one of the best books of 2019 by The Washington Post and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, among others.

John's novel for young readers, MY BROTHER'S NAME IS JESSICA, raised the ire of the LGBTQ community and friends who accused him of misrepresenting the trans experience in the novel. When one of his subsequent novellas was nominated for the Polari Prize, which celebrates LGBTQ literature, more than eight hundred writers and publishing industry workers signed a petition calling on Polari to remove John's novella from its long list. It did. Following the controversy, the University College Dublin's Literary and Historical Society rescinded its decision to present John the James Joyce Award. John, who is gay, pressed on. THE WEIGHT OF ANGELS was published this summer by Henry Holt. This isn't to minimize or dodge the issues raised by the LGBT community or by John, but our focus here is on writing.

As stated, I found THE WEIGHT OF ANGELS to be audacious in concept and execution. In it, John imagines that Oscar Wilde, the greatest playwright of the Victorian age, who was then at the height of his fame, was not arrested and charged with gross indecency with other males as he was, and that he was not convicted and sentenced to two years hard labor and jailed from 1895 to 1897 again, as he was.

In John's novel, Wilde lives a long and fruitful life into the 1950s, a half-century longer than he actually lived. I've been curious about how and why John Boyne decided to write THE WEIGHT OF ANGELS from the moment I learned of it, so let's proceed.