Trawl

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Column 1
First edition (UK)
B. S. Johnson
John Holden
English
Secker & Warburg (UK)
1966
United Kingdom
Print
183
Albert Angelo
The Unfortunates

Trawl is the third novel by the experimental British novelist B. S. Johnson. Published by Secker & Warburg in 1966, the book is an autobiographical novel based on a trip Johnson took on a fishing trawler to the Barents Sea. In 1967, Trawl was joint-winner of the Somerset Maugham Award.

Trawl follows an unnamed narrator who takes a three-week journey on a fishing trawler to the Barents Sea. As well as observing the activities carried out by the crew, the narrator also looks back at his live, metaphorically "trawling" through his past. This includes recounting past love interests and his childhood as a wartime evacuee.

Trawl was described by Johnson as: "all interior monologue". The book features an absence of paragraphs, while the length of lines in the book is shortened, thus the book is printed in a long, narrow format. When Johnson presented the work to Fredric Warburg of publishers Secker & Warburg, Warburg believed the work to be an autobiography rather than a novel. Johnson denied this, saying in response: "It is a novel, I insisted and could prove; what it is not is fiction."

The novel is noted for differing from many of Johnson's other works in that it features a positive ending, in that it when the trawler arrives home, the narrator finds his current love interest Ginnie at the dock waiting for him. Ginnie is based on his then-partner and future wife Virginia Kimpton.

In 1967, Trawl was joint-winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, given to writers to enrich their work through experience of foreign countries. He co-won with Andrew Sinclair's The Better Half. Johnson won £500, on condition that the money should be spent on foreign travel.

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