Interviews

Cult status: an interview with Mike McCormack

Mike McCormack published his first book of short stories Getting it in the Head in 1996. The debut earned him the Rooney Prize for Literature, and was chosen as a New York Times notable book of the year in 1998. McCormack has published two novels: Crowe’s Requiem, and Notes From a Coma, which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award in 2006. Forensic Songs, his latest collection of short stories, fuses traditional social realism with elements of science fiction, and the detective genre. While some stories here follow the path of straightforward naturalism; analyzing the difficult relationships within families; or the alienation of emigration, others probe issues

Route to conflict? David Priestland’s Merchant, Soldier, Sage

David Priestland is worried. Towards the end of his recently published book Merchant, Soldier, Sage, he warns: ‘[The crash of] 2008 has set the world on a course towards potential conflict, and the domestic and international forces that brought us the violence of the 1930s and 1940s are with us today – albeit still in embryonic form.’ It is fashionable, especially in heavily indebted Europe, to compare the uncertainties of the present with those of the 1930s. The Second World War is passing out of living memory and entering popular historical consciousness. Angela Merkel appeals to this when she warns that only the European project can guarantee peace; and Greek protesters

Michael Gove: why I’ll never run for leader

Today’s Guardian magazine runs a Michael Gove profile, colouring him blue on the cover as if to alert readers to the threat he poses. “Smoother than Cameron,” it warns. “Funnier than Boris. More right-wing than both. Are you looking at the next leader of the Tory Party?” There is nothing unusual about leadership speculation following a  prominent Tory frontbencher, but there is something unusual about the way Gove has ruled it out in almost any way imaginable. He has combined General Sherman and Estelle Morris, saying he wouldn’t and couldn’t do  the job. It is now being said that Gove is protesting too much, but he has been clear about this

Interview: James Lasdun’s art

James Lasdun published his first book of short stories The Silver Age in 1985. The debut won him The Dylan Thomas Award, and was followed by Three Evenings another book of stories. In 1998, Italian filmmaker, Bernardo Bertolucci, directed the film ‘Besieged’, which was an adaptation of Lasdun’s short story ‘The Siege’. In 2002 Lasdun published his first novel The Horned Man. The book earned him the New York Times Notable Book of the Year and the Economist Best Book of the Year. His second novel Seven Lies was shortlisted for the 2007 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Lasdun is also a highly acclaimed poet. His collections include A Jump

Interview – Patrick Hennessey, Kandak: Fighting with the Afghans

“It always struck me that it was a much easier war to support the closer you got to it,” says Patrick Hennessey of the war in Afghanistan. Hennessey, who served in Helmand with the Grenadier Guards in 2007, continues: “It was so obvious that we were making the country better and that we were broadly supported by the locals, certainly in a way that we weren’t in Iraq in 2006. I know that most Guardsmen preferred Afghanistan to Iraq in that respect because they felt they were doing something tangible and positive and that it was being appreciated by the people in the country, if not necessarily the people at

Interview: Mary Robinson

In 1990 Mary Robinson became Ireland’s first female president. As a progressive liberal, Robinson seemed a very unlikely candidate for the job, in what was then, a deeply conservative country.  Throughout the 70s and 80s, she worked as a human rights lawyer, as well as a Senator, arguing a number of landmark cases that challenged various clauses in the Irish constitution that failed to protect minorities. Robinson fought on behalf of women, who were effectively treated as second-class citizens, homosexuals, who were criminalized for their sexual orientation, and she also campaigned to change the law on the sale of contraceptives, which were illegal in Ireland, without prescription, until 1985. When

Interview: John R. MacArthur on the US election

When Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, millions of citizens across the United States believed it was a new dawn for the American political system. Obama promised a presidency that would tear up the rulebook when it came to party loyalty; campaign fundraising, corruption; and the petty issues of partisan politics. But he would soon learn that attempting to transform the money machine and vested interest groups that run Washington would be near impossible. First released in September 2008, John R. MacArthur’s ‘You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers To Democracy in America’ is a book that openly criticizes Obama from the liberal left. MacArthur argues that

Shelf Life: Kate Tempest

Kate Tempest started out as a 16-year-old rapper in London. Now she performs the spoken word, reading her poetry, rhymes and prose to stage audiences across the world. She has also written a play called ‘Wasted’, which toured Britain earlier this year. She is involved in a spoken word project at the Battersea Arts Centre. You can find more details by visiting her website, katetempest.co.uk. 1). What are you reading at the moment? I’m reading Robert Walser Selected Stories and a book of plays by Martin McDonagh. Also Christopher Logue’s War Music. 2). As a child, what did you read under the covers? The Wizard of Earthsea trilogy by Ursula Le Guin

Roger McGough interview

As Roger McGough approaches 75, his latest collection of poems As Far As I Know shows him writing with the same blend of mischievous word play, subversion of cliché and distinctive sense of humor that makes him one of Britain’s most popular poets. McGough became a prominent force in the late 1960s when his poems were included in ‘The Mersey Sound’: a Penguin anthology that has since sold over a million copies. To date, McGough has published over fifty collections of poetry for both adults and children. His work has always reached a wide audience due to its incredible accessibility. Along with Mike McGear and John Gorman, McGough, was a

Interview: James Kelman

Born in Glasgow in 1946, James Kelman left school at fifteen to begin an apprenticeship as a compositor. His first collection of short stories ‘An Old Pub Near the Angel’ was published in the United States in 1973. It was another nine years before his first novel ‘The Busconductor Hines appeared. Kelman has received several prizes for his fiction including: the Cheltenham Prize for Greyhound for Breakfast and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for ‘A Disaffection’. His fourth novel, ‘How Late it Was, How Late’, landed him the Booker Prize in 1994, amid a storm of controversy. To date he has published eight collections of short stories, eight novels,

Don Paterson interview

Don Paterson was born in 1963 in Dundee. He moved to London in 1984 to work as a jazz musician, and eventually began to write poetry. In 1993, Faber published his debut collection, Nil Nil, which won the Forward prize. In total, he’s published seven collections and three books of aphorisms. Paterson has won the prestigious T.S. Eliot prize for poetry twice. Other awards include: the Whitbread prize, and The Geoffrey Faber memorial prize. He received an OBE in 2008, and teaches poetry at the University of St Andrews.  His recently published Selected Poems, covers a remarkable career that spans twenty years, ranging from the half-dead Scottish towns and deserted

Interview: Nick Makoha’s shame

“My shame was my father wasn’t there,” says Nick Makoha, the London poet who represented Uganda at the recent Poetry Parnassus. This frank vulnerability is at the core of his first collection of poetry and his new theatre performance, ‘My Father and other Superheroes.’ Uganda is a source of tension for Makoha as both the place of his birth but also a place he fled, a place from which he feels distant. “Most people are from somewhere else,” he says. “So the story of the exile isn’t the minority, we’re the majority. Look at T.S. Eliot, by all rights and purposes he belongs to America. He liked French poets, Italian

Interview: Bernard Wasserstein and the Nazi genocide

As 1930s Europe moved towards the catastrophe of the Second World War, much of the greater part of the continent —  for Jews — was being turned into a giant concentration camp. Bernard Wasserstein’s On the Eve, The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War, captures the sorrows and glories of European Jewry in the decades leading up the Nazi genocide. From the shtetls of Lithuania, to the salons of Vienna, Jewish culture was already on the road to extinction. Wasserstein’s book also proves that contrary to received wisdom, there was a growing awareness that Jews were approaching a cataclysmic extinction. Bernard Wasserstein was born in London and has

LA gangs, Arab feminists, and learning Classics

‘There are more people teaching Ancient Greek in China than there are in Britain,’ declares Professor Edith Hall from the distinctively academic chaos of her study at King’s College, London. ‘Now you can either wring your hands about this, or do what I intend to, and go and talk to them! At the Zhejiang University [one of China’s C9 universities, their Ivy league] they’re translating Greek philosophy — Plato and Aristotle. They’re also looking at ancient Athens with a view to instituting a big discussion about democracy. This is the next frontier for Western classics.’   Professor Hall is in a particularly strong position to appreciate the irony that while

Transcript: IDS on Today

Iain Duncan Smith appeared on the Today programme this morning. In a heated interview with Evan Davis, the work and pensions secretary was interrogated about David Cameron’s radical welfare proposals. Conversation ranged from cutting rental payments for under-25s to protecting non-means tested pensioner benefits. The bulk of the exchange was devoted to discussing Cameron’s intentions, as he seeks to make welfare reform a central part of the 2015 election. Here is a transcript of those passages: Evan Davis: Okay, I’m going to quote a couple of things that you wrote in your green paper. ‘Successive governments have made well-intentioned but piecemeal reforms to the system. None have succeeded in tackling

Interview: Jorie Graham’s poetry

Possessing a meticulously detailed and layered style, as well as having an exceptional ability to describe nature, Jorie Graham’s poetry is primarily concerned with how we can relate our internal consciousness to the exterior natural world we inhabit. In 1996, The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994, earned Graham the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. She is currently the Boylston professor of poetry at Harvard University. Her forthcoming book, Place will be her twelfth collection to date. She spoke to the Spectator about why poetry needs to be reclaimed to the oral tradition, how technology is corrupting our imagination, and why her work is laced with contradictions and paradoxes.

Interview: John Irving on writing sexuality

John Irving’s latest novel, In One Person is narrated by a bisexual writer, Billy Abbot, who recalls his high school days from the 1950s, in the small New-England town of First Sister — where the majority of the cross-dressing residents are more likely to celebrate polymorphous perversity than puritanical punishment. Billy takes a fancy to various people, including: his stepfather; his friend’s mother; the captain of the school wrestling team; and the local librarian, Miss Frost — who reveals to Billy a secret regarding her own identity. The mood of the latter half of the book darkens when Billy moves to New York in the 1980s, witnessing the AIDS epidemic.

Interview: Evgeny Morozov and the net delusion

You are reading this article thanks to the greatest invention of the last 50 years: the internet. The web is often regarded as a panacea for absolutely everything. It is revolutionising the world’s economy. It is changing leisure and entertainment. And it is also a political tool that can liberate oppressed people. Jared Cohen, a former internet guru at the US State Department, once remarked: ‘Any combination of these [digital] tools [Facebook, Google etc.] allows for a greater chance of civil society organizations coming to fruition regardless of how challenging the environment.’ There is nothing that this incredible device can’t do. It is the greatest ever democratiser. But, a few

The net delusion

The internet is democratising and enriching the world, right? It’s happening now in the Middle East, isn’t it? No it isn’t, says Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, not as such. The Spectator has an interview with him over at the books blog (spectator.co.uk/blogs/books). He spoke to us about those liberal westerners, many of whom are close to President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, whose utopian dreams ask far too much of the internet, and how their misguided analysis of global affairs is strengthening dictators not weakening them. Here is a flavour of what he had to say: ‘We have a very confused sense of how modern authoritarianism works. It works differently.

Balls wants you to trust him

It’s only ten days or so since Ed Balls was last quizzed by Andrew Neil, but there he was rehashing many of the same lines on the Sunday Politics today. Among the things that stood out was this: the shadow chancellor’s argument on the public finances is ever more cleaving into two halves. First, he accuses George Osborne of borrowing £150 billion more over this Parliament than originally planned. (Although there’s a detail that often, conveniently, gets obscured: namely, that borrowing is still going down year-on-year under Osborne’s plan). Second, that Balls’s plan would decrease borrowing in the medium-term even though it would increase spending and reduce tax revenues in