Books - Access Interviews

Sir Alan Beith MP

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

Sir Alan Beith talks to Total Politics about his autobiography, A View from the North.

Niamh Greene

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

SHELLEY MARSDEN catches up with Niamh Greene, who's slowly getting used to being a best-selling novelist…

Susan Sontag

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

The very personal diaries of Susan Sontag, activist and writer, are to be made public by her only son

Malcolm Gladwell

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

'It's not enough to ask what successful people are like,' Malcolm Gladwell argues in his new book, Outliers. 'It is only by asking where they are from that we can understand the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.'Gladwell himself, the most successful journalist of his generation - if success is measured in captured zeitgeists - is from many places. His father is a maths professor from Sevenoaks in Kent (an inheritance which the writer acknowledges, when I visit him in Manhattan, by warming his china tea mugs over the steam of a whistling kettle, and making play of milk-in-first). His mother is a family psychotherapist from rural Jamaica, the great-great-granddaughter of a plantation owner and the slave he took for his concubine. Gladwell is pale skinned but famously Afro-haired. He grew up in Ontario, in a predominantly Mennonite town (Elmira, which has a claim to hosting the world's largest one-day maple syrup festival). He was a star mile-runner as a child (Canadian age-group record at 14, heroes: Brendan Foster, Steve Ovett). He now lives in a compact, book-ridden flat in west Greenwich Village, the spiritual home of readers of the New Yorker magazine, among whom he has semi-mystical status. Gladwell seems, when he talks, and when he writes, a product of all of these formative environments at once. He is fastidious in his phrasing (he was obsessed, he says, as a boy, by watching his father construct page after careful page of equations on graph paper); he shares his love of narrative and his gift for inquiry with his mother, whose own life story, Brown Face, Big Master (the face was her own, the master was her God), he cites as a favourite book. He cultivates an outsider's objectivity for New York, yet he displays an insider's neurotic energy. He is 45, but ageless and wire-thin; his only obvious long-term emotional attachment is to his writing; he still runs most days, and when he stops, he works. Gladwell doesn't describe what he does when sitting still as writing books, exactly. For a start he doesn't admit to sitting still that often. He dislikes desks. After an hour or two at home in the mornings, he 'rotates' around various haunts in the city - a café in the Village that plays the Smiths all day, one or two restaurants in Little Italy that don't mind him lingering with his laptop. He is a full-time theoriser. Naturally, he has a theory about why that is. 'People are experience-rich and theory-poor,' he suggests. 'People who are busy doing things - as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops - don't have opportunities to kind of collect and organise their experiences and make sense of them.' Gladwell collects and organises on their behalf.His collecting is omnivorous, his organising often inspired. There is, it sometimes seems, no subject over which Gladwell cannot scatter some magic dust. In the past he has essayed, brilliantly, in ways that make you think you understand America, the reasons why there are many varieties of mustard but only one type of ketchup, the ingredients of a perfect cookie, why men are in love with chinos, the progress inherent in the disposable nappy, and what hair dye tells us about the state of the union. He can't resist the uncanny and the untouchable: he has mounted defences of the management at Enron and written in praise of the wonders of the pesticide DDT; he has been a cheerleader for caffeine ('give a man enough coffee and he is capable of anything') and video games as the creators of civilisation. Counterintuition is Gladwell's favourite territory. His trick is to bring to the most overworked subjects the element of intellectual surprise; he never runs short of rabbits or hats. His editor at the New Yorker, Henry Finder, compares his gift to that of the young Richard Dawkins, a discoverer of metaphors rather than facts. 'When Dawkins came up with "the selfish gene",' Finder suggests, 'people who were doing bench science in evolutionary biology said: "Yes, that is what we are talking about!" but they had never quite seen it that way before. The metaphor itself gave contours to a cloud. Malcolm's work in social psychology is very like that.'Gladwell first shaped clouds of unknowing in 2000 with The Tipping Point (a phrase coined by economists as early as the 1950s), which described the ways in which epidemiology could be useful in understanding how ideas and products spread through society. His book proved a case in point. It not only became a 'viral' bestseller itself - shifting millions of copies in 25 languages - it also spawned the idea of viral bestsellers - Freakonomics and Nudge and the rest have followed, feeding an appetite for new and quirky 'behaviouralist' ways of understanding society at a time when conventional political ideologies had lost their resonance (in time, looking back at the 'long boom' we might come to see them as economists fiddling while Rome burned). His second book, Blink, which examined the power of instantaneous and instinctive decision-making, was a similar phenomenon, repackaging much of the latest thinking in cognitive psychology, and giving it the air of a personal quest. Judging a book by its cover had never seemed so persuasive. You could argue that in both cases Gladwell had a sly autobiographical impulse. In a chapter of The Tipping Point called 'The Law of the Few', Gladwell identified the people who get idea-epidemics started. He called them 'mavens' and 'connectors'. As a result of his book, happily, he accrued peerless 'maven' status (he has, since, been in demand as a maverick corporate speaker at $50,000 a time; his place in Time magazine's 100 most influential thinkers is more than secure). Likewise, in Blink, he seemed in part to be trying to describe himself to himself. Some of our best thinking is done in the first few milliseconds of contact with a new person or idea, he argued; Gladwell, with his instinctive sense of a story, immediately had the look of a master of this skill, too. How else could he jump so grasshopper-swiftly from psychological inquiries to art critics and war games and marriage guidance? (One clue: a couple of times a year, he tells me, he spends a day in the periodicals section of the New York Public Library just scanning through several hundred medical and psychological journals, looking for patterns, seeing what new ideas might have anecdotal resonance. In his own terminology, in this way, he 'thin-slices' academia, and trusts his nose for the prime cuts.)Outliers is the latest product of that method. It is advertised as that self-help staple, 'the story of success', with Gladwell's patented mix of viral nomenclature ('out-li-er\noun, a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from others of the sample') and hunch-based academic detective work thrown in. It returns him to what is his most distinctive theme: what makes exceptional people exceptional? (Buried somewhere within which is the supplementary 'what makes Malcolm Gladwell Malcolm Gladwell?')Sipping his tea, he explains this particular preoccupation to me in terms of a quickly improvised theory of the two kinds of journalists: those who start with the obvious subject and find something interesting to say about it, and those who go in search of things that are way outside normal experience. He places himself squarely in the former camp. 'I am drawn to clichés,' he says. 'Years ago when I was writing an article about physical genius - people who are highly skilled at physical tasks - the lead character in it was a neurosurgeon. A friend said, "Well, of course you do the neurosurgeon because you always start with the obvious character." And he was right. I want to start with the well known thing. Whereas [legendary New Yorker writers] Joe Mitchell or AJ Liebling were not like that at all. They would be looking for genuine oddness.' He believes that his need to understand more about insistent success stories, and in particular why some people around him were more accomplished, or happier, than others, came from his fledgling running career; it was athletics that gave him his obsession with the nature of performance. As he talks, he occasionally compares running to writing; both, he suggests, are honest expressions of the application of effort. He was in both, too, something of a prodigy. Singled out in his small school class for special tuition, he also discovered he could cover the ground more quickly than his peers. This sense continued until he was in his teens, when he was overtaken by others in his running, and came to see, intellectually, in his friend Terry Martin (now a star history professor at Harvard) what a 'genuinely gifted teenager might look like'. He once described the former moment in an illuminating essay about athletics and race; it seems such a pivotal experience that it is worth quoting at length: 'I quit competitive running when I was 16 - just after the summer I had qualified for the Ontario track team in my age class. Late that August, we had travelled to St John's, Newfoundland, for the Canadian championships... I had two white friends on that team, both distance runners, too, and both, improbably, even smaller and lighter than I was. Every morning the three of us would run through the streets of St John's, charging up the hills and flying down the other side. One of these friends went on to have a distinguished college running career, the other became a world-class miler; that summer, I myself was the Canadian record holder in the 1,500m for my age class. We were almost terrifyingly competitive, without a shred of doubt in our ability, and as we raced along we never stopped talking and joking, just to prove how absurdly easy we found running to be. I thought of us all as equals. Then, on the last day of our stay in St John's, we ran to the bottom of Signal Hill, which is the town's principal geographical landmark. We stopped at the base, and the two of them turned to me and announced that we were all going to run straight up Signal Hill backward. I don't know whether I had more running ability than those two or whether my Africanness gave me any genetic advantage over their whiteness. What I do know is that such questions were irrelevant, because, as I realised, they were willing to go to far greater lengths to develop their talent. They ran up the hill backward. I ran home.'Meeting the limits of his own dedication had a formative effect on Gladwell. He has subsequently become preoccupied in his writing with people who would go to greater lengths even than he would to achieve something. The youngest of three boys, he was always competitive. His father has described him elsewhere as 'eaten up with competitiveness', but what about those people who cared more about it than him? What made them tick? Gladwell became obsessive about obsessives.You might expect Outliers in this regard to be a handbook for the self-made man, a re-statement of the dream of American individualism; in fact it is the polar opposite of that. Gladwell's contention is not only that success is the result of a complicated mix of social advantages but also that the insistence that some individuals have extra-special gifts and talents, are geniuses in particular fields, or pull themselves up by their bootstraps, is incredibly destructive to society's idea of itself. 'No one,' he says, 'not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses - ever makes it alone.'There is nothing new in this theory, but Gladwell's gift for interdisciplinary cross-dressing once again makes it look extremely fashionable. He has a genius - one no doubt due to many social factors - for making everything he writes seem like an impossible adventure. Looking at the birth dates of professional Canadian ice-hockey players, for example, he eurekas a curious statistic. In any elite team, 40 per cent of players will be born between January and March, 30 per cent between April and June, 20 per cent between July and September and just 10 per cent between October and December. The reason? The cut-off date for year-group junior hockey in Canada is 1 January, and those children born earlier in the year had a massive advantage in physical development over their younger peers. That factor alone outweighed any innate talent - by the time age-group sports ended most of the younger kids had been lost to the system - and it holds true for any sport. Like much in his book which, under the dazzle, has a pragmatic intent, there is quite an obvious policy intervention that could resolve this problem, though no one has yet taken it up. 'It's a no-brainer,' he suggests to me, eyes wide. 'If I was England and as football-mad as England is, and as perennially disappointed, what I would do is simply split each year group into two. You would double the talent pool overnight, simply by doubling up the mini-leagues!'When, I wonder, thinking of his own athletic career, was he born?'I'm a September child,' he says. 'The cut-off for track was 1 September and I was born 3 September so I was almost the perfect example. As soon as I emerged out of age-group track I realised I wasn't as good as I thought, not anywhere near as good. So I'm a complete example of it...'That is just the first parable in a book that all educators should read. Others follow. There is the fact that children from disadvantaged homes perform less well at school than children from middle-class homes, but only when you measure their progress over the entire year. If you make the same measurements without the long summer holidays, when children from wealthier homes can exploit their greater educational opportunities, the difference is marginal. Rather than fretting about resources and catchments, why not try truncating summer holidays? There is, too, a memorable deconstruction of the myth that maths is something that some kids can do and some kids can't; and along the way there is a remorseless debunking of the idea of solitary genius. Bill Gates, it is shown, did not only have an aptitude for creating software, he also had just about unique access as a schoolboy to a mainframe computer that the parents' association of his local school invested in, in 1968. He got to it in eighth grade before just about anyone else in the world. Similarly the Beatles' genius for melody did not come ready made. They developed it while playing in Hamburg in the early Sixties, at all-night strip clubs, eight days a week. In those years they devoted more time to pop music than any of their peers. The same could be said for Mozart, or Tiger Woods. They had ability, of course, but they also had exceptional familial circumstances that allowed them a competitive advantage at a very early age. They put the hours in first.This being Gladwell, he puts an exact round figure on the number of hours such effortless competence requires. To truly master any skill, he suggests, leaning on various pieces of research, requires about 10,000 concentrated hours. If you can get those hours in early, and be in a position to exploit them, then you are an outlier.I wonder where he got his own 10,000 hours in?'I had it at the Washington Post,' he says, referring to his time there as a business reporter. 'I started there from age 24 to age 34. I had my 10 years. That was my 10,000 hours right there. I don't think I got it early, but I took it and tried to do something else with it.' There is, I suggest to him, a puritan morality at play in his book; if you get up before dawn and work hard, given the right environment you too can become Bill Gates.Gladwell admits he has always felt 'a preacherish attitude' in what he does. 'When I was young the minister at our [Presbyterian] church was this man called Reverend Boyne. I only realised after he left how good his sermons were. The form of the sermon is you start with your text and you illustrate it using a broad number of lessons from everyday life that allow people to relate it to their experience. That is pretty much my method. This book is really Reverend Boyne writ large. It is homiletic in structure...'In his sermonising Gladwell's feel for the zeitgeist has not left him. He is publishing his book at the moment when the destructive disjunction between effort and reward that has dominated the last decade or so - the criminal nonsense of the city bonus economy - is for the first time showing signs of diminishing. Gladwell has been predicting the downturn for a while: 'My money has been under my mattress for about a year and a half,' he says. 'You only had to walk through downtown Miami, say, and see a hundred condos being built to know this was not sustainable. You'd have to be a moron to think that could go on for ever.'His book also comes at a time when there is a President-elect who just about embodies all he argues: Obama never misses a chance to tell stories about how he has been blessed with a network of support, how he was given opportunity and was lucky enough to take it.Gladwell sees Obama as an almost inevitable product of an education system that for an enlightened period has favoured African-Americans who show dedication and ability. 'I don't believe in character,' he says. 'I believe in the effect of the immediate impact of environment and situation on people's behaviour.'In Outliers, Gladwell takes these arguments into potentially controversial areas of racial profiling - examining, among other things, why South Korean pilots are prone to crashing planes, and why South-east Asians are 'genetically' adept with numbers. 'I wanted,' he says of this strand of his argument, 'to really try to understand and appreciate what it means to be from somewhere, the advantages and disadvantages of race and culture. What I think can rescue us from our discomfiture about talking about race is specificity. It is not better or worse to be a particular race. It just depends on what you are doing. If you want to be an airline pilot, say, you might have an advantage if you are Western. If you want to do advanced maths, it might help if you are Asian.'In some respects, I suggest, Outliers is the work of a 19th-century social reformer. 'The thing is,' he says, 'I sort of became obsessed with the idea of patience as a component of our lives. Stubbornness, persistence, all these unfashionable traits. The book is an expression of the unhappiness with the fast-forward world I was describing in Blink.'It is also in this respect another little slice of unconscious autobiography. For all his surface fizz, Gladwell is nothing if not dogged as a writer. 'As I have gotten older,' he says, 'I have done more and more drafts. It has become more and more painstaking. I think I have realised the longer I have gone on how difficult writing is.' Gladwell's oldest friend, Bruce Headlam, who grew up with him in Elmira and now works as media editor of the New York Times, tells me that he thinks Gladwell's voice as a writer has changed. 'This book sounds to me like his father talking,' he says. 'Much more than his earlier books. His father is a wonderful guy, he could explain things, very complex things, so you could clearly understand them. He has this English order to him. And this is Malcolm's most English book.'I asked Headlam how precocious Gladwell was as a child?He laughed. 'My mother reminded me recently that he told her when he was eight he wanted to be a lawyer because he wanted to make a lot of money. He has this belief that innovation can't thrive if you are concerned with propriety. Because he was the only black kid in town, he always felt able to act a little outside propriety.'Gladwell agrees. 'It's useful as a journalist to be an outsider in some way,' he says. 'I think it gives you a freedom. The confusion of my background allows me to flit here and there, and psychologically I think that helps.'That freedom - and that dedication - seems to extend to Gladwell's emotional life. He gives away what he wants to. He has always lived alone, apparently resolutely so. I get the sense it is to allow him to pursue his work. It seems like quite a price to pay?He smiles. 'I have lived with people, though not formally,' he says. And: 'I'm just slow at getting around to things. I am aware of writing about parents' subjects - education and so on - without actually being a parent. I write a lot about kids. It allows me to make all kinds of pronouncements without being confused by actual experience. The other way to think about it is as a rehearsal. It is a way of sorting through those choices before you get there...'Headlam clarifies this a little. 'Sometimes, because I have a girlfriend, I tell Malcolm what it is like to have a girlfriend. He just covers his face and says "Oh my God!" He's very social, and he cares a lot about his friends. But he keeps on a very steady track emotionally. I've known him 39 years but I couldn't tell you what his deep-seated anxieties are. I know he cries at 'Puff the Magic Dragon', but that's about as far as it goes. He's dated a lot of women. He loves other people's kids. But he has work to do. For Malcolm to sit down and work for five hours solid and then make himself a cup of tea, that makes him the happiest man in the world.'It also, I guess, makes him an outlier.• Malcolm Gladwell will be giving two lectures on Monday 24 November at the Lyceum Theatre, London WC2. For information and to book tickets go to malcolmgladwell-live.comLife storyEarly life 1963 Born 3 September in Fareham, Hampshire. His father is an English mathematician and his mother a Jamaican psychotherapist descended from an African slave and a white plantation owner. 1969 The family moves to Canada. 1984 Graduates with a degree in history from the University of Toronto's Trinity College.Career1987 Joins the Washington Post where he rises to the position of New York bureau chief. 1996 Becomes staff writer on the New Yorker. Impresses with his unorthodox approach to diverse topics, including his 1996 essay 'The Tipping Point'. 2000 Develops his tipping point essay into a book. He has since written two more: Blink in 2005 and now Outliers.He says 'I've always been a kind of academic wannabe. I realised I didn't have the temperament to be an academic. But I thought I could at least be a liaison to the rest of the world.'They say: 'He has one of the freest minds I've ever seen in journalism and he makes use of it in so many fields I've lost count. He will write what he will write.' David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker.Ally CarnwathScience and natureguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Steve Toltz

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

In the third of our interviews with shortlisted authors we talk to Steve Toltz

Nicholas Rankin

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

At the recent Cheltenham Literature Festival, Nicholas Rankin talks to Nicola Barranger about his latest work – Churchill’s Wizards – the British Genius for Deception. He talks about how the Brits all but enjoyed outsmarting the enemy with their capacity to confuse. Just before his presentation at the festival, Nicholas talks about how the two world wars gave the British a perfect platform to exercise intrigue, trickery, delusion, subterfuge even play acting in the most tragic of theatres.

Ted Turner

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

Ted Turner appeared Tuesday on CNN, the network he founded, to talk about last week's election results, his business ventures, and his relationship with ex-wife Jane Fonda. CNN founder Ted Turner tells the network he's "encouraged" by the results of last week's election. Turner is promoting a new autobiography, "Call Me Ted" (Warner Books), which documents his life, loves, successes and failures. Probably best known for his 1980 launch of CNN, the first 24-hour all-news cable network, Turner has also made news as a philanthropist and supporter of the United Nations. He won the America's Cup of yachting in 1977, and owned the Atlanta Braves when they won the World Series in 1995. Turner discussed the book on CNN's "American Morning." The following is an edited transcript. CNN: Let me ask you first of all, before we get involved in the actual book and the story of your life: What do you make of the results of this presidential election? Ted Turner: Well, I'm encouraged. I think we needed change that we can believe in....

Josephine Hart

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

Josephine Hart tells Melissa Katsoulis that hearing the works of the great poets is food for the soul

Maeve Binchy

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

“Men do read my books, but they always seem apologetic about it, as if there were a sign on them saying ‘Women Only’” chuckles Maeve Binchy.

Aravind Adiga

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

The Man Booker prizewinning novelist answers your questions, such as 'Should India put a man on the moon?' and 'How would you advise Obama?'

Felicity Dahl

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

Felicity Dahl was married to the much-loved children's writer for only seven years, yet 18 years after his death she still finds life 'hell' without him. As the inaugural Roald Dahl award for children's books is set to be announced, she recalls the great man's seductive charms, his impish generosity - and his habit of having pink milk for breakfast

Shena Mackay

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

Like any fan of Shena Mackay's work, I associate her strongly with a certain part of south London: Norwood, Crystal Palace, Sydenham; places whose suburban indignities, from crisp bags to car parks, she has often captured so beadily and yet so beautifully. In my mind's eye, I've always pictured her sitting in a muggy caff, a milky coffee going cold beside her on an orange Formica table while she drinks in other people's curious conversations. So it's unsettling to meet her in Southampton, to where she has moved to be close to one of her daughters: a bit like finding Sherlock Holmes not in Baker Street, but Birmingham. What is Southampton like? She looks characteristically vague and anxious. 'Well, it's hard to say... it's so... big.' But she likes it? 'Oh, yes. Yes, I do.'She lives in a small, modernish house with a pointy roof and a pretty back garden in which three clay tortoises roam. She owns a real, living tortoise, too, but he lives with friends - for the company of other tortoises and because her new garden, which runs down to a stream, is unsuitable. Tortoises, she says with a small smile, are unreliable; contrary to popular belief, they move fast and are apt to wander. But this is not to say that they are unfeeling; she is certain that she is recognised when she visits. Is she teasing me? I don't think so. Like her short stories, Mackay is wry and funny, but also deadly serious, somehow. In life, as on the page, she could tell you that scorned women are apt to metamorphose into hooved creatures with rectangular yellow eyes and long yellow teeth, the better to bite their ungrateful lovers; and a part of you - a very small part, but a part all the same - would be shiveringly inclined to believe her.A woman like this puts in an appearance in The Atmospheric Railway, Mackay's new collection of stories (she sinks her jaw into a pompous academic, Professor Campbell Forsythe, for whom she once worked as his children's nanny - not that he remembers this crucial fact on their initial reacquaintance, of course). So does Southampton, though south London, with its dark cemeteries and its relics of Victorian greatness, is still a favoured setting. The title story is set in Dulwich, where retired cousins Neville and Beryl (such perfect Mackay names) are together tracing their family tree, though it's Beryl, as always, who is project leader. 'Neville and Beryl had grown up at a time when children, even the poorest, were expected to have hobbies. Beryl had dozens of them... she had conducted a correspondence with Big Chief I-Spy himself, the author of the I-Spy books.' Poor Neville, whose Meccano constructions had never lived up to his boyish imagination.Mackay is not one of those writers who dreads publication; she doesn't fear reviewers, perhaps because they have always rated her work so highly ('the supreme lyricist of daily grot' is the slightly backhanded compliment that follows her around). In interviews, it is often said that she has never received her due, but she regards this as silly. 'It's slightly embarrassing. If you look back, every time a book comes out, I always have masses of good reviews. So what is my due? OK, I'm not a dame or any of that stuff. It's one of the great unanswerables.' A brief pause. 'But I am a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and that's a good thing to be.'Mackay was born in 1944. Her father did a series of jobs, from miner to ship's purser, and was often away; his marriage to Mackay's mother was mostly unhappy. She wanted to be a writer early on, a poet preferably. 'It was through reading, and loving words. I could read when I was three.' Shortly before she left school - the family was living in Blackheath by this time and Mackay was attending Kidbrooke comprehensive, which she hated - she won a Daily Mirror poetry competition, judged by the likes of Kathleen Raine. The prize was £25. 'It was a huge amount of money, but because I was leaving school [she left with two O-levels], I had to buy these boring clothes for my job as an office junior; it had to be squandered on pleated skirts and cardigans.' The job didn't work out but, soon after, she got another one, working in an antique shop in Chancery Lane. This turned out to be life-changing, in its way. The shop was owned by the parents of David Sylvester, the art critic, with whom she later had an affair (he was the father of her daughter, Cecily Brown, the artist). The Sylvesters' son-in-law, playwright Frank Marcus, who is probably best known for The Killing of Sister George, worked there with her. It was Marcus who encouraged her to keep at the novel she had begun writing. 'He found me an agent. He had it typed out for me.'David Sylvester, meanwhile, introduced her to every painter you care to think of, from Frank Auerbach to Jasper Johns. She would visit the Colony Room Club in Soho with him, for nights out with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. 'Yes, I did meet them, but I was a young girl and they were middle-aged.' But she realised how famous they were? 'Oh, yeah. I mean, I met Giacometti. I certainly realised who he was. Sometimes, the impression is given that I used to hang out in the Colony Room. But I didn't really. They were David's friends, not mine. 'Francis could be scary. He could either be lovely or spiteful - though he was never spiteful to me. He liked me, so that was all right. It was a great time and I loved it, but at a certain point, that kind of life becomes quite sad. I realised it was much more glamorous actually to have a real life.' Her two novellas, Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumburger and Toddler on the Run, were published in 1964; two years later, she married Robin Brown, a man from her Blackheath days, and together they brought up their three daughters in Surrey (Cecily was not told that Sylvester was her father until she was grown-up). At which point, Mackay the writer virtually disappeared. The newspaper profiles stopped appearing (as a young woman, Mackay was extremely beautiful and her youth, combined with her 'progressive' ideas about things like the royal family, meant that quite a few got written), and she more or less abandoned her work. It was 13 years before her next novel, A Bowl of Cherries, appeared.She and Robin eventually divorced and she moved back to south London. Does she remember having felt frustrated during the years when she was not writing? 'I guess I felt cut off from literary life. I wouldn't say frustrated. It was the children's childhood, so it was time well spent. If I'm being honest, if I'd had more encouragement during that time, I might have written more. I did write one novel, The Firefly Motel, but it was never published. I found it recently and I reread it. I thought it wasn't too bad.' She laughs.But after A Bowl of Cherries, she was on her way again. Three collections of short stories followed and several acclaimed novels, including the wonderful Dunedin, set in a New Zealand that she then had not even visited; The Orchard on Fire (shortlisted for the 1996 Booker Prize), which is set in the 1950s, and tells the story of young girl who attracts the attention of an older man; and Heligoland, about one woman's search for Utopia (shortlisted for the 2003 Orange Prize). The Atmospheric Railway will be published with 23 selected short stories from her other collections and I cannot think of a greater treat to see one through the dark winter nights ahead. She is a dazzling sort of a writer, I think; shrewd, compassionate and, yes, lyrical. Be sure to eke them out, though. The good news is that Mackay is at work on a novel. The bad news is that it may be some time. When I ask her how it is going, she rolls her eyes. 'Slowly,' she says. Then she takes me into the garden, to contemplate the secret life of the tortoise.• The Atmospheric Railway is published by Vintage, £17.99. To order a copy for £16.99 with free UK p&p, go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0855Fictionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Terry Prachett

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

He can no longer drive and struggles to dress himself but Terry Prachett, creator of the cult Discworld books, refuses to be broken by Alzheimer's. Author Terry Pratchett has coined a word to describe the dementia with which he was diagnosed last year. He calls it an ' embuggerance', which deftly expresses his frustration at the encumbrance it represents. He recalls the fury and isolation he felt when he was told he had Alzheimer's: 'When Satan was cast into the pit of hell and raged at heaven, he was only a trifle miffed compared to how I felt that day,' he says. 'I felt totally alone, with the world receding from me in every direction.' Although he calls it a 'wretched disease', since disclosing that he has it, he has retained his dark sense of comedy. He began an address to his latest convention of fans by cracking a joke. 'I said, "Hello my name is..." Then I retrieved a crumpled piece of paper from my pocket and read out my name,' he recalls.

Neil Gaiman

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

"YOU SET OUT AND YOU HAVE THIS idea in your head of the Platonic ideal of the book you want to write, and it is a perfect thing, without flaw – not only the best thing you

Zoë Heller

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

Novelist Zoë Heller on peeing in a wastepaper basket, her pink fridge and eating bad sushi in Brazil

Alex Ross

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

In the second of our interviews with shortlisted authors we talk to Alex Ross

Toni Morrison

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

The first African-American who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 explains why the young are bored by 'racism stuff', and why religion is the driving force in her new novel

Cecelia Ahern

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

Where are you now and what can you see? I am in my publicist's office and I can see a lot of books. What are you currently reading? The Shack by William P Young. It's been number one on the New York Times best sellers list forever. It's about a man who has a confrontation with God. Choose a favourite author, and say why you like her/him Mitch Albom, who wrote The Five People You Meet in Heaven and For One More Day, which is my favourite. I always love his words. Describe the room where you usually write ...

Martina Cole

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

Romford market, a well-stocked shoe cupboard and a six series BMW

Arthur Miller

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:03:12 +0000

Early Sunday morning on a winding road in Roxbury, Connecticut; a classic American setting. White clapboard houses with flags flickering in the breeze on the front porches; a cluster of SUVs parked outside white chapels as services take place. After miles of rolling hills, a drive marked only by a weathered and rusted mailbox leads to the house where an old blue road sign on the wall reads: "Miller Way". The white, colonial-style two-storey where Arthur Miller has lived since 1957 is modest, and the grounds, while lush, are far from ornate. The air is balmy. It smells of freshly cut grass. There is a noise - the only noise other than birds chirping - and it sounds like a chain saw. A side path leads to the back of the house and an expanse of immaculate green lawn. Through the screen door to the kitchen, a young, pretty woman is making coffee. She spots us, comes out and offers a friendly introduction. She has clear skin and wears no make-up. Fifty feet away, his back to us, Arthur Miller is bent over a leaf-blower. "Arthur!" she calls out. "Arthur!" The blower stops. Calmly, he puts the machine down and walks over, a tall and lithe octogenarian who moves, in spite of his age, with natural grace. He is wearing black jeans, trainers, a short-sleeved cream shirt. His arms, like his legs, are long and lean. He is strong. Face tanned and lined, dark eyes sunk in behind glasses, he towers above us, and as he says hello there is a quiet charm that is piercing and subtle. It is easy to be in his presence. Despite his 87 years, there is still a confident sex appeal. He pays attention. It is seductive.