Moments of hopelessness come, but they eventually pass. I’ve lost a small number of friends over the years, but never over a book.Īt worst, it’s hard work of a peculiar kind – solving problems that only exist because you have created them for yourself. Second-hand copies are bought and sold online for handfuls of pounds. Putting aside the work of the teenage years (a sequence of erotic sonnets a volume of protest songs about Margaret Thatcher), my first book was a travel guide to Japan published in 1995, sadly out of print. I prefer to work alone, or in a small team. I thought that I wanted to direct plays, but brief experience at university made me realise how dependent theatre is on the temperamental peculiarities of other people. Going to preface this by saying ‘favourite’ is an impossible term, but these are some things I have liked a lot lately:Įighteen. Let’s not dwell on how many of those years were technically spent at a desk. There were seven years between finishing the previous book and delivering this one. Reading a lot of books, going for bike rides, thinking about dinner. On writing? In the last few years, definitely Tom Drury and John McGahern, Amy Leach, Alice Oswald, Lydia Davis. Who, or what, have been your most important influences? But mostly it’s very very dull to watch or to talk about. It’s slow at the beginning, and then it’s slow in the middle, and then at the end it’s quick and difficult and satisfying. I hope I’m not quite as judgemental as that… but I’ve been pushing Amy Leach’s Things That Are on people for a few years now, and when they don’t get it I don’t get them. I didn’t just want to be one of the Walker children, ducking beneath the boom and calling ‘ready about’ as we tacked our way up the lake when reading the books, I was one of them. I’ve tried reading them to my kids, and keep having to stop for some contextual discussion of sexism, class-consciousness and colonialism, which rather takes the shine off them but at the time I was completely bowled over. Swallows & Amazons, and the subsequent eleven books of the series. I’m too slow a writer to ever waste anything by leaving it in a bottom drawer. It was only when my first stories were accepted for publication, a few years later, that ‘being a writer’ came to seem like a thing. But even then it wasn’t something I thought about ‘becoming’ no-one I knew became a writer, or even entertained the idea. I didn’t start writing until I was 18 or 19, after reading Douglas Coupland’s Generation X and being won over by his emphasis on the value of telling stories. The last of each that I loved were “Lady Bird,” “War & Leisure” by Miguel, and Imran Qureishi’s glowing seaweed-like installation at the Lahore Biennale. I’m not really a “favourite” kind of person. What’s your favourite a) film b) album c) artist? My previous three books took six or seven years each.ġ0. How long did it take you to write the book that is shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize?įour years, more or less. I suppose I would be supporting my reading habit with a consulting job.ĩ. But I have no demonstrated musical talent. If you weren’t a writer, what would you be doing? I probably wouldn’t be a writer without them.Ĩ. Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison taught me at university. Who or what have been your most important influences? Who, in your opinion is the most under-read author?ħ. Do you find the process of writing agony or ecstasy?Ħ. But none of my friends have ever tried it.ĥ. It probably isn’t impossible to tell me you don’t like my book and still be my friend. What is your ‘if you don’t like this, you can’t be my friend’ book? The books I spent the most time rereading were The Lord of the Rings by J. Sadly it did not find a publisher and has been lost to posterity.ģ. My first book was an intergalactic space opera with stick figure illustrations, inspired by Star Wars, that I wrote when I was seven or eight. Was your first book published or is it still lurking in a drawer somewhere? But it wasn’t until I reached university, around the age of 18 or so, that I first began to imagine that such a thing was possible for me.Ģ. I think I would always have wanted to be a writer if I knew one could be a writer. At what age did you know you wanted to become a writer?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |