Go England! Go Writers!
Although most of our working days are spent scouring the literary world for masterpieces, we at Hamish Hamilton do find time to support a football team. We prefer underdogs and there is no greater underdog these days than the England Writers Team, a collection of novelists, essayists, science writers and playwrights, who travel the world to lose (most of the time) to German, Italian, Hungarian, Swedish, and Israeli teams. The writers did win against the Danes once (a faint memory) and last September they stormed past a ragtag group of Spanish internationals in Madrid.
Penguin is represented on the Writers Team by Hamish Hamiltonites Joe Dunthorne and Craig Taylor and well as Fig Tree novelist Patrick Neate, who managed to score three goals thanks to his solid, no-nonsense play in the aforementioned Spanish victory.
Just as the real England men’s team unveiled a dashing new kit stressing elegance and simplicity, the England Writers Team will be wearing a new white uniform for an upcoming match on the 30th of May in Norway at the Norsk Litteraturfestival in Lillehammer. The kit features our Five Dials emblem, ‘The Shoe With The Tree Growing Out Of Its Sole’, by one of our favorite artists, Nick Dewar, and calls upon one of our favorite existentialist goalkeepers, Albert Camus, to act as lucky talisman.
