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– ANAKANA SCHOFIELD – records. It’s reassuringly banal. Why we now aspire for that ­necessarily banal testimony to additionally validate our fiction is as mysterious as indulging in a paralysing death complex as a writing process. More broadly: why would readers seek to verify existence against an apparently created set of fictions? I can understand the manipulation into text of life-based observations as hidden source material, but without the tools of literature – language, rhythm, form, syntax, character and ideas – this source material would be lifeless on the page. As lifeless as the endless inquiry to the novelist as to whether this actually happened. It suggests to create fiction (that) the writer merely grazes upon herself. Often the answer is depressingly, yes. But even if it is yes, why supply it? Why erase those carefully fought for terms through which we can contemplate serious fiction over the reduction of text to merely you the writer and your circumstances. Language is bigger than you. It’s stronger than finding yourself in your own book. 152
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– Notes on Contributors – JOANNA KAVENNA is the author of several works of fiction and non-fiction including The Ice Museum, Inglorious, The Birth of Love and A Field Guide to Reality. Her short stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the LRB, the New Scientist, the Guardian and the New York Times, among other publications. In 2008 she won the Orange Prize for New Writing, and in 2013 she was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI was born in Nice of Russo-­Italian, Romano-Levantine parents, both Jews, in 1940. He lived in Egypt from 1945 to 1956, when he came to Britain. He read English at Oxford and taught at the University of Sussex from 1963 to 1998. He is the author of eighteen novels, four collections of stories, numerous radio and stage plays, and several critical books, including a memoir of his mother, the poet and translator, Sacha Rabinovitch. In 2016 Yale are publishing a study of Hamlet, Hamlet, Fold on Fold, and Carcanet a collection of essays, The Teller and the Tale. BENJAMIN MARKOVITS grew up in Texas, London, Oxford and Berlin. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study the Romantics – an experience he wrote about in Playing Days. Since then he has taught high-school English, worked at a left-wing cultural magazine, 153

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– ANAKANA SCHOFIELD –

records. It’s reassuringly banal. Why we now aspire for that ­necessarily banal testimony to additionally validate our fiction is as mysterious as indulging in a paralysing death complex as a writing process.

More broadly: why would readers seek to verify existence against an apparently created set of fictions? I can understand the manipulation into text of life-based observations as hidden source material, but without the tools of literature – language, rhythm, form, syntax, character and ideas – this source material would be lifeless on the page. As lifeless as the endless inquiry to the novelist as to whether this actually happened. It suggests to create fiction (that) the writer merely grazes upon herself. Often the answer is depressingly, yes. But even if it is yes, why supply it? Why erase those carefully fought for terms through which we can contemplate serious fiction over the reduction of text to merely you the writer and your circumstances. Language is bigger than you. It’s stronger than finding yourself in your own book.

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