"How Do We Help Writers?" Dr Alastair Niven's talk to our October Meeting

 

The healthy sceptics of the Lit. Soc. embraced the chance to test Auden’s assertion:

 "Private faces in public places

Are wiser and nicer

Than public faces in private places"

 as the Society held its first face to face meeting for months in the unfamiliar expanses of the New Hall. Alastair Niven addressed us on the theme of helping writers, drawing on his extensive experience with the Arts Council and as a Booker Prize judge. Few expected Tiptoes the Mischievous Kitten to be numbered among the most influential books in his literary life but we all had to start somewhere. Scanning the broader horizons of the British literary scene, he informed us that the U.K. had the most books published per capita (1 per 2,700) of any country in the world. 100,000 fiction works (novels, short stories) are published annually although this represents a 30% decline over the last 20 years. In our current plague years, independent bookstores have seen sales increase although the 13% increase in works of fiction has been partly offset by a decline in the non-fiction field. The plethora of publications is problematic in that many publishers cannot afford to market books. It is easier to pitch the work of glamorous, young authors. Our speaker was ambivalent about celebrity writers. While an established public profile might seem an asset, Alastair confessed that he considered recent ghosted offerings from the Clintons and Martina Navratilova as a literary nadir. Those members of the audience quietly nursing private literary ambitions would have been inspired by an unknown writer triumphing solely from word-of-mouth recommendations as in the case of Louis de Bernières and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Traditionally sales can be enhanced by the literary press e.g. The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement or the review section of the former broadsheet press although this last has been a diminishing asset in recent years. Literary prizes provide an intoxicating cocktail of publicly acclaimed merit launched on a tidal wave of favourable publicity and can transform a writer’s career. Alastair’s stints as a Booker Prize judge each involved reading between 150 and 200 novels although he admitted some judges may have been less dutiful. He made a prescient observation on the post-Booker media ubiquity of Bernardine Evaristo, nicely anticipating a cartoon in the 29 October edition of Private Eye. Evaristo was the first black woman to win the Booker although female Asian authors have had previous successes. An intriguing contrast emerged in the commercial success of two winners whose works were both set in a proletarian Glaswegian milieu. Following his 2020 Booker triumph, Douglas Stuart saw the sales of Shuggy Bain surge from 80,000 to 800,000 while James Kelman’s 1994 winner How Late It Was, How Late only managed 40,000. Admittedly, Kelman’s uncompromising Glasgow argot offered no concessions to the mainstream Anglophone reader. In some fields, most notably the Peace Prize, the Nobel judges have made some controversial even contrarian selections and the 2021 Literature prize broke new ground as it was won by the Tanzanian novelist, Abdulrazak Gurnah, the first black African winner. Somewhat embarrassingly, the last African win was the white British-Zimbabwean Doris Lessing in 2007 (born to British parents in Iran). Although arguably a win for the global South, Gurnah’s best known work, Paradise, was published in 1995 and indeed made the Booker short list. This award followed accusations that the Nobel judges ignored the more vociferous critics of post-colonialism many of whom came from the global South.

Literary festivals, book launches and poetry readings provide platforms for publicising and selling books although sometimes mandating encounters in the farthest reaches of eccentricity. The novelist P. D. James filled a marquee with 800 people at Hay on Wye and declined any fee, requesting only a donation to The English Hymn Society. She was disconcerted to learn afterwards that the organisers’ donation was a princely £5! The author Simon Brett was left completely alone for an hour and a half in one festival hall while his organising host went for her lunch.

Our speaker’s conclusion was resolutely upbeat – there is no evidence of the imminent death of the book or of reading. In a lively Q and A session he was positive and open minded on anything that facilitated the public’s interaction with Literature, be it coffee shops in booksellers or even a McDonald’s in a public library.

 William Doherty