LIDIA VIANU

Desperado is an unusual term for postmodern literature. Lidia Vianu, Professor of contemporary British literature at the English Department of Bucharest University is using its violent connotations to say that nowadays literature is not exactly an oasis of peace. [read more]

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My addiction is to surprise and the unexpected. If there’s no surprise for the writer then there’s unlikely to be any surprise for the reader, as Robert Frost once said. I suppose there must be a connection between the three activities. As a teacher of Literature I’ve always tried to make... [read more]

My grandmother was Anna Vondracek, the most basic biographical details are in the back of the book. She was my father’s mother, born in Prague, married an official at the British Embassy there, came to London with him and their two sons in late 1938 when... [read more]

I often envy the poet working in the place where he is born. Gabriel Fitzmaurice, to whom the first of the three ‘Hungarian Sonnets’ is dedicated, is precisely that. A lovely man, he has certain advantages, the most important of which is his ability to resonate... [read more]

I am not particularly concerned with generic matters – just as you cannot expect a composer to write only symphonies or only operas, so a writer must be free to explore every available form of writing. You mention the hybrid of poetry and drama and fiction, but... [read more]

Doris Lessing was born of British parents, in Persia in 1919, and was taken to Southern Rhodesia when she was five. She spent her childhood on a farm there, and first came to England when she was thirty, in 1949. She brought with her the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, which was published in 1950 and reprinted many times. It enjoyed outstanding success in Britain, America and Europe. Doris.. [read more...]

Alan Brownjohn: At the age of five, the poems my mother read and/or sang to me (Edward Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’ remains my favourite poem) and the poems one schoolmistress read to us – these seemed to me to have sharper, clearer, more beautiful images of the world, real or unreal, than the actual world. Mrs. Palmer (the schoolmistress) made the dog in Walter de la Mare’s... [read more...]

Julian Barnes: Well, I’m rather surprised to be called a Desperado. I rather like the description (who wouldn’t?) but you make us (if there is an ‘us’, which I’m sceptical about) sound like a gang led by Clint Eastwood. But who is Clint, and are we a gang? I think we are a very disparate number of rather quiet writers who write rather differently from one another. I certainly think, for my part, that my... [read more...]

Money. A Suicide Note (1984) is a talked novel, in the first person. Very much like Alasdair Gray’s 1982 Janine , Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, and also in the style of Bellow and Updike. The novel is depressing and too rarely rewarding. John Self (the symbolism of the name is more than obvious) begins as a rich drunk (to say the least of it, since his list of vices is long), and ends...

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Graham Swift: I think the mixing of different genres or modes of writing applies only to some of my fiction, especially Waterland – though Shuttlecock contains a book within a novel and Ever After a journal within a novel. I don’t think this is either my principal approach to writing or something I have consciously intended or developed. You go where the spirit takes you or do what a particular narrative demands. The book within... [read more...]

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