Significant Others

Winner of the 2024 Prototype Prize, Significant Others is a luminous and radical collection of hybrid texts exploring intimacy, language, and the porous boundaries between the human and the other-than-human. Refusing the conventions of magical realism, this work offers instead a different means of describing the world as it is, in opposition to the reductive logic of Western capitalism which views other-than-humans as only resources for extraction. Significant Others proposes, instead, a shared language: one spoken by animals, stones, plants, mirrors, or the sounds of whales and thrushes across incompatible temporalities. Erotic, unruly, and profoundly embodied, these texts embrace a queer materialism shaped by the writing of Audre Lorde and the philosophy of Empedocles. Here, a catfish slides through the London Underground, a lump of topaz rearranges a person's thoughts, a cliff face is touched into speech. What emerges is a tender confrontation with madness, monstrosity, and the limits of human form. Significant Others interrogates what counts as communication - beyond spoken language, beyond human grammar - and listens closely to the textures of a world always already in conversation.