 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|||||||||
| Interview with Hilary Mantel by Debbie Taylor HILARY Mantel's emails to me always begin ‘Dumela’, which is ‘Hello’ in Setswana. Twenty-odd years ago – unbeknownst to one another – we both moved to Botswana. There, landlocked in the parched centre of Africa, we embarked on our separate writing careers, tapping away on manual typewriters at dawn, before the heat set in. We never met; she lived in a village near the border with South Africa;I was further inland, towards the Kalahari Desert. But for both of us the dislocation was an opportunity to devote serious time to a craft we’d never attempted before. Mantel was working on a hugely ambitious historical novel about three key players in the French Revolution. She’d started it almost unconciously, back in the UK, reading obsessively on the subject and taking copious notes. ‘After a while,’ she remembers, ‘I started wondering why I was taking all these notes. Then I realised it was going to be a book. A Place Of Greater Safety was nearly 350,000 words long – four times the usual novel length – and took six years to write. She refers to it now as ‘my Brechtian novel’, with a gutteral rolling of the ‘r’ that recalls her working-class Derbyshire background. The book displayed many trademark Mantel characteristics: elegant writing style, satirical authorial voice... For the whole interview, read Issue 30 » Subscribe! Go to » Hilary Mantel's Method |
 |
|||||||||
|
For more on HILARY MANTEL, go to www.contemporarywriters.com
|
|||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
Top of page | Home | Contact | About | Subscribe | Submit | Advertise | Tell Us