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The Taste of Marmalade

This short story is published by Kindle Single and is an exploration of voice, written in the ‘close-up’ third person, exploring the effects of migration on identity and integrity. The story of Katrin, a young woman from Poland who gets bullied in her café job, centres on her perceptions as a vulnerable and yet enthusiastic outsider. She left her native Poland for opportunities in the ‘boom’ period of the UK economy, but she is forced to leave London during the recession and in the wake of austerity measures. The practice-led research poses questions of defamiliarisation through language and voice, using experiments with syntactical shifts and deviations from ‘standard’ English in a third person point of view. These shifts engage the reader by mimicking a first person narration, but the defamiliarisation offers a challenge to notions of self and identity in the objective versus the subjective narrative voice. This ‘defamiliarisation’ weds form and content in an approach to representation of cultural identity in contemporary London.