Lorem Ipsum

Lorem Ipsum, the debut novel from poet Oli Hazzard, consists of a single, 50,000-word sentence. An epistolary fiction addressed to an unidentified email recipient, the novel is modelled after the Japanese prose genre of the zuihitsu, which means 'following the brush'. This playful, disruptive and digressive novel is written out of and towards a moment of crisis in the ordinary, in which the experience of attention has changed entirely. Lorem Ipsum is also an intimate, singular exploration of being a parent and a child, of dreams, work, fantasies, reading, happiness, secrets, memory, protest, repetition, intergenerational conflict, and the forms of community which appear or disappear based on how we conceive of 'shared time'. It is a book about the foundations upon which we build our lives, and what happens when they are shaken.

Oli Hazzard is the author of three books of poems, Between Two Windows (Carcanet, 2012), Blotter (Carcanet, 2018) and Progress: Real and Imagined (SPAM Press, 2020), and a book of literary criticism, John Ashbery and Anglo-American Exchange: The Minor Eras (Oxford University Press, 2018). He lives in Glasgow, and teaches at the University of St Andrews.