Grauniad article about new novelists

lol
I sometimes put my favourite authors on top of ones I don't like in bookshops.

sounds a bit like art colleges, then.

Sorry poodlepusher, I didn't express that very well, and my comments weren't directed at you in particular. Of course there are talented young writers, you are quite right.

However, many of the students on CW courses simply don't have anything very interesting to say, IMO, and also lack the language with which to say it. In other words, they're just not very good writers. Most of them refused to even venture an opinion about anything in tutorials. The universities are to blame, as they stand to gain financially by taking on students, so are less and less fussy about the calibre of the students they accept on these courses (not restricted to CW of course).

oh this is an interesting discussion. I am outside the UK, but trying to get published in britain. As a reader, I'm not really aware of the importance of London - but nobody can miss the same old names coming up in every bookshop in germany.

i didn't blame the publishers - I said they are forced to make it a race (by those exact booksellers you mention).

I don't think being 24 yrs old means you can't write because you've not got 10 or 20 years more experience. There have always been writers who can write beautifully at that age.

How old was Jane Austen?
What about Norman Mailer - didn't his first novel come out when he was very young?

And Geraldine Riley had 2 novels published the first when she was 21 and the second a few years later. The first was the best of the two and it also sold....

Is the London bias restricted to novelists? I've noticed that many (if not most) successful poets are NOT London based. I did wonder about whether poetry was more linked to a strong sense of identity, or maybe a strong connection to a certain form of language? Or just not commercial and hence the London bias doesn't apply?

Oh and Eliza, I disagree - there is certainly a HUGE market for celeb biogs and misery memoirs. the publishers aren't stupid and they wouldn't be churning them out if no-one was buying them. So I'm afraid that the great British public must also shoulder some of the responsibility.

At the risk of sounding like a corporate whore, I don't think the blame can be laid entirely at the feet of the publishers. The booksellers, particularly Borders and Waterstones must surely take some of the blame for the state of things.

I would also point to some of the creative writing courses, which seem to churn out hordes of bright young things who have very little to say (not surprisingly, since most of them are about 24 years old). These courses seem to be more about teaching people How To Get Published than about how to write (or indeed why).

UQD, I know you are involved in teaching CW, and am not intending to offend - would you agree though? DP recently finished an MPhil on one of the more lauded CW courses and was heartily disillusioned. He got a distinction, but was sick of the way that they try to teach you a particular way of writing that seems to rob 'real' writers of their true voice.

He hot, that Edward Hogan though.

(deliberately lowers tone)

I'm really glad you started this thread, it feels like the first discussion on Adult Fiction that hasn't just been a list of "oh I love this" or "I hate that". I was getting quite bored and despondent, so thank you.

Ooh, I so agree about the 'snubbing' thing.
Hey, can you imagine being a judge of one of those things and having to agonise over it... 'Mart's latest book is crap but if I snub him he will never speak to me again....'

UQD: one of my favourite things is Private Eye's yearly round-up of who's puffed who and how they know each other Hilarious and depressing at the same time.

Slightly off on a tangent, but it also pisses me off when I read about nominations for the various big lit prizes and judges supposedly 'snubbing' people - surely (and bless my naivety here if you like) books should be nominated because of their quality and/or suitability, not because they were written by a player in the lit scene? I seem to remember there being some hoo-ha about Ian McEwan not being nominated for something recently and everyone acting like he should automatically be in there just because he had published that year. There were several rather withering articles on the final shortlist's books, along the lines of "These are all very well, but where are the big hitters, where are the proper authors?"

I want to write regional literature - in the sense that place is hugely important to the stuff I am trying to write. I couldn't do it in London. If that would make it regional in a negative sense, well, that sucks.
Do you have a positive connection between place and what you write - or do you just randomly live where you do for reasons of practicality?

Ah well, maybe we can have a local literature revival in the same way as the local food revival....

What do you think of no frills publishing deals where the publisher doesn't pay the author an advance? Is that becoming more common?

On the Barnes/Amis/McEwan thing, I read Martin Amis's 'My Struggle' recently (or 'Experience', as it is actually called) and it was depressing the way a thread ran through the book of the same little gang of people, all male, London/Oxford-based and of a certain age and background, dominating the literary scene as authors & editors of literary review pages (Amis, Barnes, Raine, Hitchens, O'Hanlon...). What was even more depressing was how accepting they were of this state of affairs.

I agree completely that writing isn't a race. Publishers have been forced to make selling books a race though.

You can't please everyone all the time, and there are vastly varying talents between different editors. The comments you got back were crass. I don't know if you have an agent but its my understanding that badly expressed and unconstructive stuff like that doesn't land in the lap of the writer when all it does is depress / anger them.

Don't let that put you off what you're doing.

"But it's also dispiriting to note the extent to which McEwan and his cohort (Barnes, Ishiguro, Amis - the usual posse) continue to dominate the shelves and the discourse when it comes to discussing contemporary Brit Lit."

So, er, which authors tend to get the main feature slot in the Saturday Guardian every single fucking week? Would that be new up and coming talent, or would it be the same coterie of tired old names that have been talked about for decades, constantly invited back to write about their own work, a pet love or each other's oeuvres?

FFS. I hope the Guardian chokes on its cake.

LOL - the teen market at the moment seems to be all science fiction about a post-global warming drowned Britain.
Was not surprised when the book that won the Chicken House children's fiction comp was, guess what, science fiction about post-global warming.....