Blake Morrison

The success​ of Paul Harding’s first novel, Tinkers (2009), is the kind of good luck story worth passing on to any dispirited author. When Cold Water Flat, the band he drummed with in the 1990s, broke up after touring the US and Europe, he studied creative writing at the University of Iowa, under the tutelage of (among others) Marilynne Robinson. The novel he spent the next decade...

Richard Ford​ is sceptical about character. He thinks it changeable, provisional, unpredictable, irresolute and ‘decidedly unwhole’, which makes things tricky for a novelist. You send a man to see his girlfriend in the expectation that she’ll dump him and she tells him how sweet he is. You don’t know where you are with people. They don’t know where they are...

Jon Fosse​ doesn’t use sentences, or prefers not to end them. When you open Septology, with its smallish print and narrow margins, it can feel like a death sentence – all the more so since the book, much possessed with death, runs to more than eight hundred pages. There are no paragraphs or full stops here. Fosse has called the writing ‘slow prose’ and it lingers on...

Ma,​ as everyone calls her, is exasperating to her family. Eighty years old and recently widowed, she refuses to get out of bed. Despite the entreaties of her son Bade (in whose Delhi house she lives), and pleas from her daughter Beti, daughter-in-law Bahu and grandson Sid, she lies with her face to the wall, as if readying herself for death. After 170 pages of inactivity, she’s more...

There​ is a terrific photo of A.E. Coppard on Brighton racecourse one Sunday morning in 1901. Dressed in running gear (white shorts, sleeveless vest, bare feet in leather running shoes so thin they look more like ballet pumps), he’s down on his haunches, leaning forward, waiting for the starting gun. There are no competing runners nearby; he was obviously posing for the camera. But the...