@TillyMumsnetBookClub
Evening everyone
Firstly, thank you to all those who have posted their reviews and thoughts so far. It is always fascinating to see how a book affects readers in different ways.
I?m delighted to welcome Helen Macdonald, winner of the 2015 Costa Prize and author of the exceptional H IS FOR HAWK, to Bookclub this evening.
Helen, thank you very, very much indeed for giving us your time tonight. And congratulations on the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Costa and your terrific success with this wonderful book. We have a fair few questions to get through so I'll just add the standard Mumsnet ones that we like to ask all our authors...
What childhood book most inspired you?
What would be the first piece of advice you would give to anyone attempting to write fiction?
What is the best book you?ve given someone recently?
And the best you?ve received?
Over to you...
Thank you! Hello everyone, very excited to be here for a chat! I’ll try not to make too many spelling mistakes and typos or ramble too much!
What childhood book most inspired you?
So many! I was totally obsessed with Susan Cooper’s eerie and wonderful Dark Is Rising series. Like loads of childrens' books the main story is about a child learning that they have magical powers, and discovering, too, that they have an important role to play in the fight between good and evil. But it wasn’t that sense of magical individual power that drew me to the main character or the books themselves, it was that they had this marvellous voice, and they talked so bewitchingly of history and landscape and myth. Herne the Hunter, the Chiltern hills, wren-hunts, witches made of willow branches and of course all the Arthurian legends too. They’re very beautiful and poignant books. I still love them.
What would be the first piece of advice you would give to anyone attempting to write a book?
Writing is hard. It’s emotionally confronting. It makes you doubt yourself. It’s makes you want to do almost anything other than it, sometimes. So I guess the first piece of advice is: Sit down and write! It doesn’t matter how bad what you write is. Just get it down. You can go back and revise it later. There are lots of other things for writers to think about, but that’s the most important. If you’re anything like me you’ll be prone to terrible procrastination. I would much rather rather make toast, alphabetize my book collection, pair socks, have a bath - anything rather than get down to typing. In the middle of writing this book, there were days I was so desperately keen not to do it and so scared that I couldn’t write anything good that I couldn’t bring myself to even click on the manuscript file until and open it until about 9pm. Absolutely pathetic!
What was the best book you've given anyone recently?
I gave my friend Christina - who is in my book - a copy of Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. It is a novel about a group of travelling actors putting on Shakespeare plays after a virulent flu virus has destroyed civilisation. It’s plotted beautifully, is full of love and the most wonderfully drawn characters. It races along like a thriller, and but at heart it’s about hopes and humanity and loss and and the power of art. I really recommend it.
And the best you've received?
My wonderful editor at Jonathan Cape gave me a copy of Threads by Julia Blackburn. It’s one of the most original and unusual books i’ve ever read. It’s about her search to find out more about a man called John Craske, a fisherman who had serious health problems and created the most exquisite embroidered tapestries and paintings dealing with his life on the sea. What I love about the book is that Blackburn’s research leads her to all sorts of strange stories and wonderful encounters, and the book becomes an embroidery of sorts, a thing made of different threads, different stories and voices and anecdotes, and it is also a very moving book - her husband passed away as she wrote it - and that is woven into the narrative too.