Jarred McGinnis’ cultural highlights

Jarred McGinnis was chosen by The Guardian as one of the UK’s ten best emerging writers. His debut novel The Coward was selected for BBC 2’s Between the Covers, BBC Radio 2’s Book Club and listed for the Barbellion Prize. The French edition won the First Novel Prize and was selected for the prestigious Femina prize. He is the winner of the 2023 Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award. His second book There is No Meant to Be was published by Harvill in 2026.

Book: Collapse by Édouard Louis, translated by Tash Aw

I most admire the emotional candidness and the intellectual rigour that Louis brings to his work. The direct style serves to underline the routine tragedies of addiction, bigotry and domestic violence. He does an incredible job of painting the people in his life with the contradictory messiness that reads true, while highlighting broader themes of class, gender and family in France. With Collapse, he follows the decline and death of his alcoholic half-brother, and anyone who has dealt with addiction will recognise the confusion of feelings that Louis’ craft is able to pin down in a single illuminating sentence that has you nodding in agreement. Yes, it’s exactly like that.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/468252/collapse-by-louis-edouard/9781787305038

Prehistory: Chauvet Cave. Le Grotte Chauvet 2 

This is the third prehistoric cave painting reconstruction that our family has visited. Many people have said to me that they aren’t really interested because it is not the real thing. They are wrong. Every time, I am unprepared for the emotional response. To see a prehistoric child’s footprint; to see where a torch has left blackened smudges against a wall; to see where our ancestors marked the point in the cave where sunlight never reaches; to see that humanity understood how to represent perspective, time and motion over 30,000 years ago; to see they too were seeking understanding and telling stories, just as we are today – that is the real thing. That the setting is the verdant Ardeche valley, surrounded by charming French villages, is a bonus.

https://www.grottechauvet2ardeche.com/ 

Art: Could It Be Love by Greer Lankton

I stumbled upon Greer’s last work, It’s All About ME, Not You, at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh at the end of the twentieth century. The work still haunts me and contributes, to this day, to the DNA of my artistic approach. The pain, beauty, sadness and humour of her work is all there. She creates an intimacy with the viewer that, in real life, would take decades to know a person so well. Thirty years after her death, her first monograph was published last year. If you don’t know Greer’s work, fix that now.

https://goodpress.co.uk/products/greer-lankton-could-it-be-love

Film: No Other Choice (2025) directed by Park Chan-wook

I love it when the artist wins me over. I am a grumpy and impatient reader or viewer. It’s an occupational hazard from spending your life making sure your own work is just so. Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice eventually brought me on side through the force of vision and execution. Initially, I was suspicious of the premise and the lightness in which murdering another human is held. But I was missing the point. It would be like complaining about the verisimilitude of Cinderella’s stepsisters cutting off their toes to fit into the glass slipper. The performances by the principal actors, especially Lee Byung-hun, carry your sympathies as he ineptly murders potential rivals for a job after being fired from his job at a paper mill. This is a modern fairy tale about what it takes to care for a family while humanity is being made redundant.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1527793/

Cultural activism: Wetopia

The current project by this organisation is focused on sustainable tourism, addressing the issues of ‘us’ (locals) and ‘them’ (tourists) that inevitably occur in cities like Marseille. Previously, their “This is Us. This is Brussels” project trained city residents to interview their neighbours across demographic divides to foster engagement and build a more cohesive community in one of the most diverse cities in the world. At a moment in history when you keep waiting for the good guys to come over the hill in their white hats to do something, to make lives better, Wetopia are doing that something, and the good guys are red-headed Belgian ladies with a mission.

https://www.thisisus.brussels/

Favourite WritersMosaic writer

I nominate Anni Domingo. It is hard not to admire an artist like Anni when you see the depth, breadth and scope of her work. An indefatigable force for good. I’m glad she’s on our side.

Jarred McGinnis

Jarred McGinnis is a writer and has been chosen by The Guardian as one of the UK’s ten best emerging writers.