Interview with James Meek
by the view from here magazine on June 11, 2008
Originally posted at: the view from here magazine
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James Meek’s last book, The People’s Act of Love won the 2006 Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award, the 2006 Ondaatje Prize and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. James has worked as a journalist since 1985 and his reporting from Iraq and about Guantánamo Bay won a number of British and international awards. In 2001 he reported for the Guardian Newspaper on the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and the liberation of Kabul. James new book is We Are Now Beginning Our Descent.
What’s your ideal night out/in?
I’m not sure, but it’s a good title for a short story. Like Charles Bukowski’s ‘Would You Recommend Writing As A Career?’
What is your favorite book?
Tristam Shandy.
How did you first make a break into getting your novels published?
I typed out the manuscript of my first full-length novel when I was eighteen, and sent it off to publishers, but they turned it down. I am glad about this now. I had a few short stories published in magazines and in one book when I was at university and, in 1988, when I was 25, I sent off another novel, McFarlane Boils The Sea,to a small Edinburgh publisher called Polygon. They liked it and, in 1989, published it. For this, my first published novel, I was paid four hundred pounds.
More at the view from here magazine.
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