Paige Hochhatler Interviews Isabel Waidner
Isabel Waidner is the author of four novels – including Sterling Karat Gold, which won the Goldsmiths Prize and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and Corey Fah Does Social Mobility which was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Their new novel, As If, will be published in 2026 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. They teach in the School of the Arts at Queen Mary University of London.
From Editorial Assistant Paige Hochhalter: Sterling Karat Gold is a wacky, and genre-defying novel that follows the character Sterling as they grapple with being unjustly arrested for a crime they didn’t commit. Traversing time, space, and memory, Sterling’s journey irrevocably intertwines fiction, art, and imagination with the painful and jarring hardships of reality. The novel explores the oppression of queer people, immigrants and racial minorities, analyzes the patterns that tyrannical governments use to perpetuate violence, and offers insight into the power found within reclamation and community. I had the pleasure of interviewing author Isabel Waidner through email in October 2025..
Paige Hochhalter: Much of Sterling Karat Gold exists within the nonsensical realm of absurdity. From a part-from, part-fledgling court judge, to a spikey spaceship capable of time travel, to a sentient pink fountain spire, anything and everything is possible in Sterling’s world. Were there any elements of the novel that felt easier to write because of the expansiveness and playfulness of the style? What about harder to write?
Isabel Waidner: In Sterling Karat Gold, absurdity is anything but nonsensical. It is used as a mode through which to write the sociopolitical reality we live in now—makes sense, doesn’t it? I’m not sure the possibilities that opened up as a result made writing easier. I will admit, the entire book was hard to write.
PH: Towards the end of the novel, Sterling and Chachki’s show, Cataclysmic Foibles, functions as more than just a performance piece, operating also as a body of art that artists utilize to protest injustice and enact social change. In real life, you’re the cofounder of Queers Read This, a reading series at the Institute of Contemporary Arts that enacts its own kind of social change by recognizing the creative work of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC people.
Clearly, you’re passionate about art, and the power within it. Do you have any suggestions about how artists can harness their creative power as a form of resistance?
IW: You’re right. I think that collective creative labour on an ongoing basis is a form of resistance and that art can make a difference to people’s lives. How exactly that resistance might look like? I guess good art explores just that.
PH: Interwoven throughout the surrealist world of Sterling Karat Gold are numerous references to public figures, art pieces, and locations grounded in our modern reality. When conducting research for this novel, how did you go about picking which real-life subjects to highlight? Is there one that had a particular influence on your life that you just knew you had to include?
IW: My ambition for the book was to animate the actual experience of queer working-class people living at this particular historical juncture, and all of the cultural reference points I have used are chosen and mobilized for precisely that purpose: to write life. To give an example: the Black horseman referenced in the opening chapters is the subject of Robert Colescott’s painting End of the Trail (1976). This supposedly defeated horseman, head hanging, is depicted with an incongruous and mischievous grin, suggesting he’s nowhere near done yet. This sort of unlikely resistance, that emerges where least it’s expected, defines the ethos and aesthetic of Sterling Karat Gold as a whole.
PH: All of the characters that make up the main cast of Sterling Karat Gold are referred to with they/them pronouns. Why was it important to you to include gender non-conforming characters in this novel?
IW: I am a gender-nonconforming writer so the characters in this particular book represent myself and my social field.
PH: Alongside functioning as an integral method of transportation across space and time within this novel, spaceships are also established as a metaphor for a moment of clarity in which a person recognizes the undemocratic, deceitful actions of a government system. With an understanding of this framework, I found one paragraph about spaceships particularly poignant.
Sterling explains that they “could handle a spaceship when it still meant something. But since it’s back to back spaceships, files of spaceships filling [their] entire horizon… since spaceships and political lies, built on political lies, built on political lies, are literally all there is left, it’s becoming increasingly hard to register spaceships as spaceships anymore.” What insight do you hope readers take away from this statement?
IW: The word “spaceship” operates on several—literal and figurative—levels in Sterling Karat Gold. Among other meanings, a spaceship “is a moment in which discreet neo-authoritarian governance and deliberate governmental deceit become apparent, just momentarily, before vanishing again.” If, as the quote you chose suggests, every governmental communication is a lie, if this is a strategy, then the lies stop astounding us—they become entirely normalised. This is what’s been happening in an international context.
PH: Sterling has an unshakeable fixation with the loss of their parents. At numerous times throughout the novel they retell the story of their loss, each time including obvious alterations to their tale, leaving me to wonder about which portions of their story are accurate. Can you speak a little about what you intended to highlight with the inclusion of these alterations, and the fuzziness of Sterling’s upbringing?
IW: Sterling did not just lose their parents, but, as a result of migration, their entire country and culture. The book’s opening sets the scene in that respect: “I’m Sterling. Lost my father to AIDS, my mother to alcoholism. Lost my country to conservativism, my language to PTSD. Got this England, though. Got this body, this sterling heart.” The unreliability of their memory relates to the fact that their past is simultaneously absent and overly present in strange ways, as is part and parcel of the migrant experience.
PH: The title of the novel, Sterling Karat Gold, is intriguing, and wonderfully ironic. Would it be accurate to say it’s both a clever nod to the name of the story’s main character, and the novel’s dissection of purity and impurity (aka corruption), or am I reading too much into it?
IW: No this is perfect: yes.
PH: Do you have a particular writing process, or any wacky rituals that help you get into the headspace for crafting stories?
IW: These days I write practically every day and I exist in the necessary headspace—even when I shouldn’t! Coffee helps, too.
PH: Writers often seek to hone their craft by learning from the work of their peers. Is there a particular author or artist that you draw inspiration from?
IW: Too many to name! I'm always in conversation with novelists, poets and artists, some of whose work I engage with explicitly in Sterling Karat Gold—there is a list of references at the back. I'll answer an easier question instead: I read two excellent novels just this last week: Katie Kitamura's Audition and Claire-Louise Bennett's Big Kiss, Bye-Bye.
PH: Now for the hardest question. If you had to choose, which of your published novels would you say is your favorite? What about it solidifies it as such?
IW: This is the easiest question: my favourite novel is As If, forthcoming in 2026. My second favourite is Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, out now. The novel challenges conservative ideas of social mobility, which, especially in fiction, are often told as simplistic triumph-over-tragedy narratives, or connected to mythologies around merit. I use the example of a writer, Corey Fah, winning a prize to make the case that it might not be quite so straightforward: propelled into unfamiliar contexts of social power and opportunity as a result of their win, Corey has to contend with their difference and their messy past catching up with them—in the shape of cute but freaky Bambi-like character. Sterling Karat Gold is important to me because it did make the writer I’ve since become.
Paige Hochhalter is a third-year undergraduate student at ASU, currently pursuing a BA in Creative Writing and a minor in Film and Media Production. She aims to explore themes of grief, friendship and identity through her work. She is published in Pomona Valley Review. Alongside writing, she also enjoys reading (shocker), painting, and performing Broadway musicals alone in her bedroom. You can connect with her on Instagram @sillystoryteller_