Moses McKenzie on community, awards and chocolate

‘An Englishman can’t teach yuh nothing but how to forgive him crime’ says 14-year-old Jabari at the start of Fast by the Horns, the sophomore novel by Easton-raised writer Moses McKenzie which was recently shortlisted for The Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year award.

Set in 1980s St Paul’s, Fast by the Horns follows Jabari, a young boy growing up in a Rastafari community, as he grapples with masculinity, religion, family and community tensions.

Published in May 2024, the novel has received critical acclaim over the past few months, with Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair writing for The Guardian that the book was “a fascinating depiction of Black immigrant life and Rasta boyhood”.

On February 16 it was announced Fast by the Horns had been shortlisted for the Young Writer of the Year award, a prestigious prize given to the “best work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry” by a British or Irish author 35-years-old or younger.

Fast by the Horns has been shortlisted for The Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year award

The four-person shortlist includes Moses as well as Scott Preston, for his debut novel The Borrowed Hills, and two other Bristol-based authors: Harriet Baker, for her debut Rural Hours, and poet Ralf Webb for his non-fiction debut Strange Relations. 

The winner, who will be awarded £10,000, will be announced on March 18 at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. The runners up will receive £1,000 each.

For his debut, An Olive Grove in Ends, Moses won the Breakthrough Writer Award at the 2022 Soho House Awards and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 2023.

However, for Moses, whether he wins The Young Writer of the Year award or not is unimportant.

Bristol-based author Ralf Webb’s Strange Relations has also been shortlisted for this year’s Young Writer of the Year award

When asked about being shortlisted by Bristol24/7, Moses said: “If I placed value in the winning of awards, maybe I might feel something, but that’s not how I value the success or failure of my work.”

So how, then, does Moses measure success? And does he think of Fast by the Horns as successful?

“It’s quite a complex question”, Moses said. “A lot of what I intended I did achieve in the work, in terms of conveying the messages and in terms of stylistic choices. There are definitely things I would do differently if I had to write again.

“So, I don’t know…How people respond to it is important, but who those people are…they’re not in awarding bodies.”

Fast by the Horns is definitely written with Black and Caribbean people at the forefront. From the subject matter – ‘the area that was once the pride of the slaving city was now entirely in West Indian hands’ – to the prose.

In 2022, Moses won the Breakthrough Writer Award at the inaugural Soho House Awards

Still, just as books written by white authors about white communities can often be accessible to diverse audiences, Moses explained that while he did “have a specific people in mind when writing, that shouldn’t take away from its accessibility”.

Although his first two books, An Olive Grows in Ends and Fast by the Horns, were set in Easton, his next novel will be an epic set in the 15th century Caribbean (primarily across Trinidad, Grenada and Martinique).

He is currently in the research stages for it and expects to start writing next year. He said the book will “follow the islands’ response to a family’s rise and fall with the discovery and cultivation of chocolate.”

Inevitably, he said, his third book will also end up providing “commentary on the present relationship between chocolate, the Caribbean and the African continent”.

After all, centuries after European colonisation in the Caribbean, cocoa was brought by European colonists to West Africa. 70 per cent of the world’s cocoa beans are now grown in the region and many have continued to raise concerns about human rights abuses within the West African chocolate trade.

Main photo: Gee Photography

Read next:

• Moses McKenzie shortlisted for Writer of the Year Award
• Loyalty, faith and familial ties in 1980s St Paul’s
• Moses McKenzie wins breakthrough writer at Soho House Awards