Library Chat: Carys Davies and Aubrey Gabel
My mamma / [Dr. Jayne Company].
Novelist, short story writer, and Fellow Carys Davies and Aubrey Gabel, Fellow at the Institute and specialist in French and Francophone literature and visual culture, came together for a Library Chat reflecting on their time at the Institute, where neighbouring offices sparked conversations on books, knitting, and shared interests. In discussion, they explored Davies’s new historical novel, set between 1870s Connecticut and the Antarctic, and Gabel’s research on comics journalism, considering how fiction, visual storytelling, and research can offer new ways of engaging with history, place, and human experience.
Carys Davies is a novelist and short story writer based in Edinburgh. Her short story collection The Redemption of Galen Pike won The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. Her debut novel, West, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, longlisted for the Europese Literatuurprijs and winner of the Wales Book of the Year for Fiction. Her second, The Mission House, was The Sunday Times 2020 Novel of the Year. Her third, Clear, published in 2024, won the 2025 RSL Ondaatje Prize and has been nominated for several others, including the Walter Scott Prize, the Winston Graham Prize, Scotland’s National Book Award and the Wales Book of the Year. She has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
