C E Anunkor

C. E. Anunkor writes warm, funny, faintly unruly books about the things people carry and can't quite bring themselves to say.

A part-time and wholly unrepentant reader of P.G. Wodehouse, Terry Pratchett, and Neil Gaiman, Anunkor came to writing the long way round — by way of a lifelong weakness for the kind of book that says out loud, in good company and at exactly the wrong moment, the thought you were quietly not supposed to say. The kind where a footnote turns out to matter more than the paragraph it hangs from. The kind where the joke and the wound are wearing the same coat.

C. E. Anunkor writes comedy that means it — the kind that is quietly doing something tender while you are busy laughing. The tone owes a frank and lifelong debt to P.G. Wodehouse, read part-time and loved full-time: the sentence built like a pocket-watch, the immaculate timing, the airy surface over deep good humour, the trick of treating even the most ridiculous characters with an almost embarrassing kindness. To that inheritance add Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, and the ambition comes into focus — light prose carrying serious cargo, a joke with a wound tucked neatly inside it, the footnote that turns out to be the whole point, and an incurable weakness for saying out loud, elegantly and at precisely the wrong moment, the thought everyone else in the room is carefully not saying.

That last part is really the entire project. Across a body of work that wanders cheerfully between comic fantasy, bureaucratic satire, and quieter, stranger literary fiction, the costumes change but the errand never does: to take the unsayable thing — the grief, the absurdity, the small human truth we have all politely agreed to keep under the table — and set it gently on the table anyway, where it turns out to be far better company than anyone feared.

Anunkor holds, as a settled article of faith, that a well-made sentence and a kind one are the same sentence, and writes accordingly.

Published work under Park & Webster Press.