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Comment from the book world in January 2025

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Poets 'manage to gather thought and feeling, and intellectual and emotional intensity into words'

7 April 2025

Poets ‘are the great people in literature because they manage to gather thought and feeling, and intellectual and emotional intensity into words in a way that I haven't done in my writing...

I notice, going into bookshops, the brand of fantasy novel that has exactly the same way of beaming what it is to children: brighter and shinier...'

Michael Morpurgo, author of 30 books for children and young people, including War Horse, on publication of his second book for adults, Spring, in the Sunday Times Culture.

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'The nerds have inherited the Earth'

24 March 2025

‘To call it alternate history is being too dignified about it... I almost like the idea that people would be able to see loads of inconsistencies in the worldbuilding, because it's meant to be stupid and ridiculous...

Fantasy means that you don't have to be too meticulous with any of that, you can just throw things at the wall and hope it sticks...

I like things that are familiar but doing something slightly surprising with them at the same time. A bickering werewolf and vampire seem like a classic combination, some sort of wizard seems obvious. The invisible elf? I don't know exactly how I ended up with an invisible elf...

There was a time when it (fantasy) was seen as proper lame and nerd stuff and now the nerds have inherited the Earth. This stuff is just totally centre of the road culture. It doesn't have that ghetto sense about it, not nearly as much as it once did...'

Joe Abercombie, author of The First Law trilogy, The Age of Madness trilogy with three standalone novels, The Shattered Sea trilogy and The Devils, which will be published in May, starting a new series, in the Bookseller.

https://joeabercrombie.com/

 

'The issue of copyright affects all of us'

10 March 2025

‘If someone had told me I would become one of the people talking about AI, I would have gone "come off it'" but here we are. I am not anti-AI. It is here to stay and there are many brilliant things about it, and I absolutely will licence my work for AI because we need it to be trained by properly researched work. But the issue of copyright affects all of us...

I can't substantiate this, but I think people, particularly women, have been persuaded AI is very complicated. But scraping material without permission is theft - simple as that. There's a copyright law and some generative AI companies are not following it, and the government seems minded to let them get away with it. You don't need to understand AI to know that's wrong. It would be devastating for the creative industries. So, yes, copyright champ was not what I expected at this moment in my life but that's what I'm like: I can't shut up."

Kate Mosse, author of Labyrinth, Sepulchre, The Joubert Family Chronicles, The Linder Ghosts and The Taxidermist's Daughter and co-founder of the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction in Bookbrunch.

https://www.katemosse.co.uk/

 

 

Police officer to bestselling author

24 February 2025

‘I've been phenomenally lucky to have that book (I Let You Go) published, and also lucky in the way that readers responded to it. To be able to sustain a career as a full time writer from my debut for more than a decade is something I will never take for granted. There are so many brilliant writers who aren't able to write full time, and who are really struggling to get the recognition they deserve...

I looked at authors who wrote series, and I privately thought they had it easy - they didn't have to create anything new, they had the characters, they had the world, all they had to do was throw another story at them. But it's not like that at all. Although you've got your core characters, you're creating new characters, and you create a new world and universe in each particular book. I boxed myself into a few corners with previous stories - for instance, I might want Ffion to go back to the station, but then I'd realise she couldn't, because I'd put it miles away and she couldn't physically get there. There were all these constraints - I found it really challenging...

The beautiful thing about writing a series is that you get more of a chance to dive into characterisation than you do in a standalone. Not just because you've got more books to explore it, but because readers expect and want a little more depth. In a different world, if I were a different sort of writer, I would write romance - I'm a sucker for a love story, particularly if it's not conventional.'

Clare Mackintosh, author of 9 novels, including I Let You Go, Hostage and Other People's Houses, which have sold more than 2 million copies across 40 countries, in Bookbrunch

 

Writing narrative history

3 February 2025

‘It encapsulates everything I love about medieval history. I'm interested in power and how it worked in an age where you've got no standing army, no professional police force, no modern communications - how does a government in Westminster rule a whole country? You've got these two individuals - first cousins, almost exactly the same age but such utterly different men - brought to the point where the failings of one mean that the other has to take over, causing a whole different set of problems. If you wrote it in fiction it would look too neat. And of course the fact that Shakespeare has told their story so gloriously is a whole other layer drawing you in...

Narrative is the key for me, and this is the key step away from the kind of history I was writing when I was teaching in a university. What I want to do is to stand in the shoes of the protagonists in my story, try and see through their eyes, so chronology becomes absolutely crucial, instead of the rather eagle-eyed academic overview where you're trying to analyse structures and processes.'

Helen Casto, author of The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry V, She-Wolves: the Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth and Joan of Arc, in the Observer.

 

'They are looking to be entertained'

20 January 2025

'I know it is the old J K Rowling argument but it is important culturally to get people to sit down and read 300 pages and she had done that. Look at Colleen Hoover, who has sold millions of books around the world and there could be a class of writers who are jealous of that but she has brought so many people into bookshops and brought so many people into reading...

I love Stephen King, Marian Keyes, Kate Atkinson; she can write an absolute page-turner but also when you are reading it you are thinking "This is amazing what you are doing and I'm envious of that."...

If I was to write Midnight's Children there would be a bit of me that would go: "I'm not sure people are going to enjoy this." I've always written and presented for an audience, created a show for an audience, that is the thing that I'm interested in...'

When most people watch television or watch films or read books they are looking to be entertained and I'm not dumbing myself down in any way. I am working to the absolute level of my intelligence.'

Richard Osman is a television presenter and author of The Thursday Murder Club, The Man Who Died Twice, The Bullet That Missed and The Last Devil to Die, all number one, million-copy international bestsellers as well as New York Times bestsellers. We Solve Murders is his fifth novel. The Times

Richard Osman's publisher's page

 

'I'm violently against any form of censorship...'

6 January 2025

‘I have written four novels from the point of view of a woman, which is regarded as appropriation. I'm violently against any form of censorship. I defend a novelist's right to write about anything he or she wants. But in today's climate, the judging will be more harsh, severe or penetrative...

There is no point in trying to whitewash old attitudes. Trying to tidy up the bad behaviour of novelists of the past is misguided and fundamentally a waste of time. But you can certainly alert people that opinions expressed in these books are not opinions we have in polite society today. Evelyn Waugh's Scoop is full of racism. But you can't possibly go back to Scoop, remove all that and represent it as Evelyn Waugh's novel. You have to take the rough with the smooth...'

William Boyd, the prizewinning author of 17 novels, including A Good Man in Africa, Any Human Heart, Stars and Bars, Love is Blind and The Romantic, in The Times.

http://williamboyd.co.uk/