Possessions
‘I was so thirsty for the prize of academia, so thrilled to defy the fates, that I suffocated my own history and culture, my Burmese heritage and my mother’s language. By doing this, I also possessed my ancestors and made them dance to the tune of Imperialism. How could I be so wrong?’
After two decades of academic research and undergraduate teaching Davina Quinlivan, and the world of university education, were approaching crisis; teaching online, ticking boxes for other people's diversity criteria, stuck, like so many others, in a cycle of fixed term contracts. Yet as a child of Anglo-Burmese parents, growing up in West London, academia had promised a way out. Something better.
This is her powerful, compelling story of fragmenting and rebuilding from the inside out, one that is filled with the voices of both Burma and Southall. Haunted by the ghosts of colonialism, Davina Quinlivan beautifully lays bare our blind spots as we grapple with decolonisation and the hypocrisies within our institutions of education.
Book details
- Format
- Paperback
- ISBN
- 9780715656044
- Published
- 29 January 2026
- Pages
- 240
- Duration
- Dimensions
- 135 x 216 mm
- Genre
- Memoir and Biography
- Imprint
- September
Reviews
'Possessions is an emotive, innovative and necessary book. Davina Quinlivan tells her story of academia and the literary world; of wanting in, getting in and then finding out just what that cost. It manages the amazing feat of being both delicate and a gut punch'
'A fever dream of a book. Powerful and important'
'A luminous memoir of self-reinvention. Lyrical, unflinching, Possessions is a powerful meditation on identity, inheritance, and bodily autonomy'
'Possessions is a brilliant examination of how a young woman of mixed-heritage and working-class origin has been pressurised into assimilation. It charts Quinlivan's ultimate rejection of "passing for something else" as she reclaims her mind and body. Told in stunningly beautiful prose, it's impossible not to be moved by this story of the power of nature to heal a spirit once hidden and now coming into the light' Angharad Hampshire, author of
'A fearless memoir of transformation and belonging. With lyrical precision and startling honesty, the author reclaims language, identity and the body as sources of power and renewal. Blending myth, memory and intellect, this is a spellbinding work of resistance and rebirth: tender, defiant and alive'
'Possessions is a feast of countless courses - among them the life of St. Sidwella, feminist theory, Burmese folklore and the horrors of Zoom job interviews. The result is as disturbing as it is compulsive: a wonderful, soul-scouring book'
'I can hear this book's heartbeat as I turn its pages. I love it for its wildness and its thirst and hunger for wisdom and transformation. Possessions is a book of changes, thoroughly engaging, wonderfully alive'
'A brave and intimate book, reading Possessions is to be inside the head of Davina Quinlivan, following thoughts, excavating memories'
'A wonderfully original balance of clear-eyed intelligence and steely academic rigour with a truly wild conceptual sensibility, all buoyed on taught, restrained prose'
'With extraordinary writing that dances across the page, this book is urgent, feverish, dreamlike and wild. An excoriating, haunting, slide show of ancestors and decolonisation, imploding academia, class and projection, and the truth of what we really ask for, when we ask for assimilation of all kinds. Brilliant and brave'
'Possessions is the most beautiful and original portrayal of a journey into and through the world of academia that I have ever read'
'A hallucinatory journey through her life in UK academia'
