I was intrigued by the ease with which all of us had a global identity while locating our influences linguistically in English. We also had a local resonance. Later, meeting Caldwell, we discovered we could take on our global identities and yet locate our writing in the local; resonances of being Belfast-born, and in my case, Delhi-born Chennai-ite, both living in England. The common thread between us was we didn’t live and reside in these cities of nativity. These were cities of a homeland that defined our cultural ethnicities. Our birth, families and their respective professions propelled us to different places. In words, we shaped heimat, this idea of home and belonging wherever we moved. But there was also a haunting of the idea of a home. It shaped ‘something’ that had comfort, and there was also something that was missing. The chemistry of this having-not-having, that became a recall of an absence in writing, determined or defined our senses of ‘home’. It’s not about location, or identity, or status.

For Caldwell, in her book Multitudes, home is the memory of listening to Van Morrison on a car journey and a street sign in Belfast referred to in the lyrics. Home is the taste of transition, is my reading of the sign. It leaves so much open.

Covid-19 hit us all, and in populist premonition we were simultaneously global and local. In that time of live meetings, a sort of visual silence and live virtual world, Caldwell set herself to write a novel: Belfast. Award winning again.

Apart from her immersive writing, she is also tutor at the Faber Academy. In 2024, I attended her 12-week Faber Short Story Salon, an intensive and stimulating short story course to work on perfecting the form. Unsurprisingly, as soon as the course is announced, it is sold-out in seconds.

So, after writing an award-winning novel set in Belfast, what makes her return to the short story? The secret lies in the title of her latest work, Openings, published by Faber.

I attended the launch in London. It was reassuring, following Covid’s furtive footfall, to know that Caldwell had used that time to get on with writing, but more importantly, as she says, ‘crafting’ – a whittling away of excess, paring the wood to make an arrow fleet in communicating what is human between writer and reader. And she did come up with 13 short stories. Her readers emerging out of ‘isolation’ had her new work to look forward to; she never fails on the promise of a new frontier in writing.

The opening story signposts the notion of ‘Home couldn’t be other people, much as we want it to be. I thought suddenly of the sign on the way back from the airport when we were little… If you lived here, it said, you’d be home by now!’ alluding to a staticity that is not home either. It opens ‘home’ to be a frequent flow and friction of here and there.

We talk about process later at the British Library, and she speaks of entering a ‘spell’. It is an authentic dedication to time and location and her short story enables her reader to experience this spell too. It has as much to do with process as it does with craft. This sounds complicated only because it is simple.

Jan Carson mentions “the perfectly formed sentences and devastating precision” of Caldwell’s work. It is her capacity to enter the zone of her characters and to be open to something that is happening to them in the moment that threatens a life change. Within that something happening to her characters, who are flawed yet continue day after day, she brings in the haunting of what could be possible.

In Something’s Coming she masters suspense: a presence in the house that a young family has entered is turned into an existential reckoning: “I could feel the doll smiling… Whatever it was, curse or desire, whatever it wanted from me was winning. If you don’t face your fears, I thought, they chase you forever, feeding on you, swelling in strength till they consume you.”

She defines the silent indefinable. This is not solely in the structure within the story, but also across the selection of short stories. Her sane obsession is to make the meaning of the story be an arrow in flight. The writer has to be open to that trajectory, neither forcing, nor walking away. She defies genre and yet creates mysteries, thrillers. She is the mistress of paradoxes too.

The short stories are written in first person, and then, in Daylight Raids, she brings the reader into the frame looking on at two lovers during the blitzkrieg in London, cinematic yes, but with the music, punctuation and precision of language. What are they thinking? As they stand there… he’s part Irish on his mother’s side; spent boyhood holidays… on the Bangor coast; is sure to have visited Nendrum, scrambled about the ruins, scraped knees and freckles, making a visor of his hands to look out over Strangford Lough, half-pretending to scour the horizon for longboats.

And then she brings us back: he gazes over Regent’s Park at the falling dusk at the falling dusk.… I think he has the impulse that I do, that you have, half instinct, half compulsion to work out how to say it… at the edge of the calm before an air raid.

Lucy Caldwell’s return to the short story is about time being present; about the brevity of a moment tipping over into a life span. The impact stuns in a single reading.

At JLF 2025 the author will be discussing form with Namita Gokhale and others. Also at the festival, on 2nd February at 5pm, she will launch my book, The Living Legend – Ramayana Tales from Near and Far.

Vayu Naidu is Professor of Practice at SOAS, UK, Lecturer in Theatre of the Outspoken at RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art). She is also a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and works on critical thinking and writing with A-Level students and wants to bring this to Indian academies.