Jack Klausner: 'I write more on the darker end of the spectrum'

Fictionable

Already this summer we've heard from Samantha Harvey, Patrick Cash, Carolina Bruck and her translator Ellen Jones. This time we're getting under the surface of Jack Klausner's short story The Coalface.

Klausner tells us how this story emerged from a memory – his partner's mother remembering her own father eating a block of melted cheese for his tea. "It sort of spun out from there," he says.

While Wales is no monolith, Klausner explains, in South Wales mining still looms large. But over the last thirty years its meaning has changed.

"Now it seems it's almost like a ghost that hangs over families, or hangs over towns," he says.

Coal once represented "hope and potential", Klausner continues, driving industry forward to progress and prosperity. But as the climate crisis accelerates the black stuff has taken on a more menacing shade.

"It might end up being in someone's fireplace, keeping them warm," he says. "But you've got to get it there, and it's a dark and dangerous journey to that point."

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