The Writers of Wales Database

SIMPSON, PENNY

Email: pennyclaire.simpson@gmail.com
Twitter: @topscribe

Fiction writer based in Cardiff. Penny studied at Brighton Art College and Essex University, before starting work in journalism. In 1991, she won the Barclays/Theatre Management Association Theatre Critic of the Year Award. Penny's short stories have appeared in anthologies from Bloomsbury, Tindal Street Press, Honno, Parthian Books and Virago. Her first collection of short stories was published by Gomer (2003). She received a 1999 Arts Council of Wales travel bursary enabling her to visit Berlin to research her debut novel The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum (Alcemi, 2008). Penny won the 2007 Rhys Davies Short Story Competition for her story Eagle in the Maze. She is a Fellow of the Hawthornden International Writers Centre.

The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum (Alcemi, 2008)

The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum is set in 1920s Weimar Berlin and is a novel about exile, told by a Jewish chef who uses extraordinary recipes as a subversive form of storytelling. Poised on the eve of world war, it brings together the burlesque and the tragic, drawing on historical characters such as Greta Garbo and kabarett legend Klabund, in addition to the atmosphere and cultural innovations of 1920s Berlin. Esther Rosenbaum could give Nigella Lawson a run for her money: she is the creator of chocolate hearts stuffed with saffron pen nibs, jugged hares served in toy drums and an edible Cuckoo Clock, filled with marzipan birds that hide a terrible secret. All is served up at a very special banquet in an inflation-hungry city edging towards disaster.

At times, the novel’s Berlin setting is more reminiscent of Nineties’ Hoxton in London’s East End: a celebrity chef and her art collector patron winning headlines; a succession of artists misbehaving badly and a restaurant that becomes a mecca for the glittering circle attached to playwright-of-the-moment, Bertolt Brecht. But it also captures a city at a time of remarkable change, with poignant echoes of a lost world now found largely in a museum’s display case, or hidden away in private memories.

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