Artist Party: Ruth Asawa - MoMA

The literary power couple is a historically seductive concept. Two writers sharing a life, their private and creative worlds entwined, each becoming witness to and critic of the other’s work. Think Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. Or, less auspiciously, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Now, into this illustrious company steps a new pair: the novelist Marlon James and the biographer Nicholas Boggs, whose books have each been shortlisted for one of Britain’s most prestigious literary awards – James for the Booker prize and Boggs for the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction. Between them, they have produced two formidable books, each the culmination of years of work, and each concerned with the lives of Black queer men whose stories have often been overlooked. “I’m not sure what to do with it,” James says, when I ask how they feel about the inevitable impending “literary power couple” label. “I have all these romantic notions that we were like Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne or something – I don’t know. What do you think?” He turns to Boggs, who laughs. “It’s all very new,” he says.