An Interview with GRAHAM SWIFT
an interview with GRAHAM SWIFT Conducted by Stef Craps raham Swift is one of the most successful and respected novelists writing in contemporary Britain. Since 1980 he G has published eight novels, a collection of short stories, and a nonfiction book. His work has garnered critical acclaim and literary prizes, and it has won a large and appreciative audience throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. His most celebrated books are Waterland, from 1983, which is widely considered a modern classic, and Last Orders, which was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize in 1996. Both novels have also been made into films. His latest novel, Tomorrow, came out in 2007. Swift belongs to a generation of talented novelists born around the middle of the twentieth century—including Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Salman Rushdie— who, as they came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were seen to represent a new wave in British fiction. However, Swift has never allied himself with any literary school or movement, and his work defies easy categorization. For example, it seems too invested in the traditional concerns of the English novel (like explo- ration of character and storytelling) to warrant the label “postmod- ern,” which can be more readily applied to many of his peers, yet too self-conscious and formally sophisticated to fit comfortably under the rubric of realism. With fellow novelists Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Caryl Phillips, though, Swift shares an evident and abiding preoccupation with issues of trauma, memory, and recovery. His protagonists— mostly first-person narrators—tend to be humble, unheroic, Contemporary Literature 50, 4 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/09/0004-0637 © 2009 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 638 • CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE vulnerable elderly men who are forced by a crisis situation in their personal lives to face up to an often traumatic individual and collec- tive past.
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