Graham Swift | |
---|---|
Born | Graham Colin Swift 4 May 1949 London, United Kingdom |
Occupation | Novelist |
Education | Dulwich College; Queens' College, Cambridge; University of York |
Notable works | Shuttlecock (1981) Waterland (1983) Last Orders (1996) |
Notable awards | Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1983) Booker Prize (1996) James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1996) |
Graham Colin Swift FRSL (born 4 May 1949) is a British writer. Born in London, UK, he was educated at Dulwich College, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York.
Some of Swift's books have been filmed, including Waterland (1992), Shuttlecock (1993), Last Orders (1996) and Mothering Sunday (2021). His novel Last Orders was joint-winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a controversial winner of the 1996 Booker Prize, owing to the many similarities in plot and structure to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying .
The prize-winning Waterland (1983) is set in The Fens. A novel of landscape, history and family, it is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English literature syllabus in British schools. [1] [2] Writer Patrick McGrath asked Swift about the "feeling for magic" in Waterland during an interview. Swift responded that "The phrase everybody comes up with is magic realism, which I think has now become a little tired. But on the other hand there’s no doubt that English writers of my generation have been very much influenced by writers from outside who in one way or another have got this magical, surreal quality, such as Borges, Márquez, Grass, and that that has been stimulating. I think in general it’s been a good thing. Because we are, as ever, terribly parochial, self-absorbed and isolated, culturally, in this country. It’s about time we began to absorb things from outside." [3]
Swift was acquainted with Ted Hughes [4] and has himself published poetry, some of which is included in Making an Elephant: Writing from Within (2009).
Waterland was adapted into a film of the same name in 1992. [7] The film was directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal and starred Ethan Hawke, Jeremy Irons, and Sinéad Cusack. [8]
Swift's novel Mothering Sunday was adapted into a film in 2021, starring Olivia Colman and Colin Firth and featuring Glenda Jackson. [9]
Henry Graham Greene was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century.
Phyllis Dorothy James White, Baroness James of Holland Park, known professionally as P. D. James, was an English novelist and life peer. Her rise to fame came with her series of detective novels featuring the police commander and poet, Adam Dalgliesh.
Julian Patrick Barnes is an English writer. He won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, having been shortlisted three times previously with Flaubert's Parrot, England, England, and Arthur & George. Barnes has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories.
Ian Russell McEwan is a British novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945" and The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 in its list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture".
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, known professionally by her former married name, A. S. Byatt, was an English critic, novelist, poet and short-story writer. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
Barry Unsworth FRSL was an English writer known for his historical fiction. He published 17 novels, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, winning once for the 1992 novel Sacred Hunger.
Gilbert Adair was a Scottish novelist, poet, film critic, and journalist. He was critically most famous for the "fiendish" translation of Georges Perec's postmodern novel A Void, in which the letter e is not used, but was more widely known for the films adapted from his novels, including Love and Death on Long Island (1997) and The Dreamers (2003).
James Kelman is a Scottish novelist, short story writer, playwright and essayist. His fiction and short stories feature accounts of internal mental processes of usually, but not exclusively, working class narrators and their labyrinthine struggles with authority or social interactions, mostly set in his home city of Glasgow. Frequently employing stream of consciousness experimentation, Kelman's stories typically feature "an atmosphere of gnarling paranoia, imprisoned minimalism, the boredom of survival.".
The Guardian Fiction Prize was a literary award sponsored by The Guardian newspaper. Founded in 1965 by the Guardian's Literary Editor, W.L. Webb, and chaired by him until 1987, it recognized one fiction book per year written by a British or Commonwealth writer and published in the United Kingdom. The award ran for 33 years before being terminated.
Graham William Joyce was a British writer of speculative fiction and the recipient of numerous awards, including the O. Henry Award, the World Fantasy Award, and six times the British Fantasy Award for both his novels and short stories.
Waterland is a 1983 novel by Graham Swift published by William Heinemann. It is set in The Fens of eastern England. It won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Last Orders is a 1996 novel by British writer Graham Swift. The book won the 1996 Booker Prize. In 2001, it was adapted for the film Last Orders by Australian writer and director Fred Schepisi.
Dame Hilary Mary Mantel was a British writer whose work includes historical fiction, personal memoirs and short stories. Her first published novel, Every Day Is Mother's Day, was released in 1985. She went on to write 12 novels, two collections of short stories, a personal memoir, and numerous articles and opinion pieces.
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. Her short story collection Wednesday's Child was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
Eleanor Catton is a New Zealand novelist and screenwriter. Born in Canada, Catton moved to New Zealand as a child and grew up in Christchurch. She completed a master's degree in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her award-winning debut novel, The Rehearsal, written as her Master's thesis, was published in 2008, and has been adapted into a 2016 film of the same name. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Booker Prize, making Catton the youngest author ever to win the prize and only the second New Zealander. It was subsequently adapted into a television miniseries, with Catton as screenwriter. In 2023, she was named on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list.
Peter Ackroyd is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a specialist interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William Blake, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Charlie Chaplin and Sir Thomas More, he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He is noted for the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices, and the depth of his research.
Shuttlecock is a 1993 French-British thriller film directed by Andrew Piddington and starring Alan Bates, Lambert Wilson and Kenneth Haigh. It is based on the 1981 novel Shuttlecock by Graham Swift.
Amy M. Homes is an American writer best known for her controversial novels and unusual short stories, which feature extreme situations and characters. Notably, her novel The End of Alice (1996) is about a convicted child molester and murderer.
Shuttlecock, described as a psychological thriller, was Graham Swift's second novel, published in 1981 by Allen Lane. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1983 and was released as a film in 1993.
The Light of Day is a 2003 novel by English author Graham Swift, published seven years after his previous novel, the Booker Prize winner Last Orders.