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Comment from the book world in January 2016

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January 2016

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'The steamroller to the ant'

18 January 2016

‘From our positions as individual creators, whether of fiction or non-fiction, we authors see a landscape occupied by several large interests, some of them gathering profits in the billions, some of them displaying a questionable attitude to paying tax, some of them colonising the internet with projects whose reach is limitless and whose attitude to creators' rights is roughly that of the steamroller to the ant.

It's a daunting landscape, far more savage and hostile to the author than any we've seen before. But one thing hasn't changed, which is the ignored, unacknowledged, but complete dependence of those great interests on us and on our talents and on the work we do in the quiet of our solitude. They have enormous financial and political power, but no creative power whatsoever. Whether we're poets, historians, writers of cookery books, novelists, travel writers, that comes from us alone. We originate the material they exploit.'

Philip Pullman, authro of His Dark Materials and many other children's books and President of the UK Society of authors, in the Bookseller

 

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'It's an adrenaline rush'

11 January 2016

‘Once I get an idea in my head it's an adrenaline rush, and I'm racing to get to the end. I think fast and write fast. It sounds uncreative, but I write from 9-5, four days a week. I have two kids and have had to be very structured. I start a book every January, it's due in June, I edit during the summer and it's published during the autumn. Every year. This year and next, I have two books out, which is a bit mental.'

Cecelia Ahern, author of PS I love You and The Marble Collector in the Telegraph's Stella

 

'The vibrancy of our literature'

6 January 2016

‘As Taylor makes clear, over the past century the exigencies of making a living have never been enough to stop writers and commentators from debating, noisily and disputatiously, about the direction of literature, its distance from popular taste and which self-appointed minority is fit to interpret and pass judgement on it. These are questions that matter to Taylor too because the vibrancy of our literature, summed up in this wide-ranging, entertaining and thoughtful survey, is a marker of our wider cultural health. That such questions mattered always used to be taken for granted and what worries him now is that they no longer are.'

Michael Prodger reviewing D J Taylor's widely-praised The Prose Factory: Literary Life in Britain Since 1918 in The Times