Copy: The National, December 2012

>> I’ve been loving Novak Djokovic’s imperious performances in the Australian Open thus far… and I think they may well be born of a man with something to prove. That might sound odd after he began and ended 2012 as world No.1, but in between, he lost the French Open final to Nadal. He lost on the grass at Wimbledon in both the All England Championships and at the Olympics. In the US Open final Djokovic lost again, to his great friend Murray, in a tight, five-set match.

And people seemed more interested in the fact that he’d bought the world’s supply of donkey cheese than the fact he’d won a compelling ATP World Tour Finals match over Roger Federer in November.

And that’s a fact. Well, almost.

Anyway, warming up for the Australian Open, he played – and won – a tournament in Abu Dhabi, and I profiled one of the greatest tennis players of all time for The National. An exaggeration? I don’t believe so. The problem Djokovic has is that he happens to play in the same era as at least two more of the true greats. Perhaps that’s to his benefit – there can be no resting on laurels here. That No.1 status can only be carefully cherished by winning.

Click here for the full story in The National

Copy: The Observer, January 2013

>> When I was choosing my books of 2013, my heart sunk a little when I found that Sid Lowe’s chronicle of Spanish football – a story I’m very much looking forward to reading – will be called Fear And Loathing In La Liga. The overuse of Hunter S Thompson’s most famous headline is depressingly unimaginative – even when used in the context of the “gonzo journalist” himself.

Which brings me on To Fear And Loathing At Rolling Stone, a collection of Thompson’s work for the famous American magazine at which he made his name. Reviewing it for The Observer this week crystallised all my doubts about his uneven output – it’s actually quite a gruelling, even irritating, read. Thompson was unique, and by goodness didn’t he know it.

Still, when this hyperactive writer found himself at the heart of an intriguing story and took the time and care to write about it properly, he was peerless.

Can’t bear the Terry Gilliam film, though.

Click here to read the full review of Fear And Loathing At Rolling Stone in The Observer

Copy: The National, January 2013

>> Last month I congratulated Anjali Joseph for her Man Asian Literary Prize longlisting. And another book I dearly hope makes it ont0 the shortlist announced on Wednesday is Benyamin’s Goat Days.

The tale of a migrant worker trapped in modern-day slavery in the Gulf might not sound like the most seasonal of reads, but it completely captivated me this Christmas. Najeeb is an average lower middle-class Muslim from Kerala who wants to earn some quick money, pay off his debts and provide for his young family. But when he arrives at Riyadh airport, wide-eyed and enthusiastic, he is kidnapped and dumped in the desert, forced to tend goats for an evil arbab. Any small mistake results in terrible punishment. Tragically, it’s also based on a true story – but then, the fact that the author was told this story by its protagonist does suggest a certain uplifting twist in the tale.

It was fascinating talking to Benyamin – real name Benny Daniel – for The National as the debates surrounding migrant labour in the Gulf are many and varied. Benyamin says that in Bahrain, where he lives, the situation has got much better – which is quite a statement from someone who came to find work from Kerala himself, 20 years ago. But as we talked about a Dubai taxi driver who I spoke to last time I was there – who hadn’t seen his Pakistani family for years – we agreed that not only was there a long way to go, but that the obsession in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and so on with finding a fortune in the Gulf had to change.

And that’s why Goat Days is so effective – the narrative is compelling enough, but it’s a quietly political and sociological novel too. Even if it doesn’t make it onto the Man Asian shortlist, it’s available to download across the world. I urge you to do so.

Click here to read the full interview with Benyamin in The National

Copy: The National, December 2012

>> When English PEN – the worldwide literary network with a mission to “defend and promote free expression, and to remove barriers to literature” – announced their 2013 awards for writing in translation last month, it did feel like a little bit of a misnomer: of the two books translated from Arabic, one will see the light of day in January and the other not until May.

But the point of the award isn’t just to recognise good writing, it’s to help the publishing companies promote, market and champion the books. The initiative must be working, because Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim won earlier in 2012 and, after going on a UK-wide tour to promote The Iraqi Christ, his book is published by Comma in February. It’s fantastic and I’ve spoken to him about it, so watch out for an interview soon.

The Iraqi Christ is a brilliant expose of real life in Iraq, which, transposed to the wider region, is also the idea behind Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus. I’ve read three of the excerpts, and they are among the most moving, inspiring and revealing pieces of non-fiction writing I’ve come across in some time. Safa Al Ahmed talks of the experience of being Shi’a in Saudi; Mohamed Mesrati details life under Gaddafi in Libya; and Khawla Dunia’s “diary of an unfinished revolution” in Syria is heartbreaking. What makes their achievements all the more staggering is that there’s only one previously published author among them. These are personal reflections – and all the better for it.

Editor Layla Al Zubaidi told me she hoped the book could “underline the fact that the struggle for freedom and dignity is not an overnight thing – it is been going on for a decade or more”, which is point emphasised by the other Arabic book to win a 2013 English PEN Award. Nihad Sirees’ The Silence and the Roar might on first glance seem another timely novel, a Syrian author writing about a man who dares to defy a tyrannical ruler’s regime. But it was first published in Arabic in 2004.

Copy: The National, January 

>> A little look forward to the books I’m most intrigued by in 2013. Written for The National, so there is more of a bias towards novels with a more global outlook – but that’s no bad thing. And I can’t wait for Dave Eggers’ A Hologram For The King, which is actually set in the Middle East anyway…

Click here for my full list of 2013 literary highlights

Copy: Metro, December 2012

>> It’s been another great year for sports writing, and once again, the William Hill Sports Book Of The Year judges were spot on, their award going to Tyler Hamilton’s The Secret Race. It’s not often that a book can change the direction of a whole sport, but his confessional of his time on Lance Armstrong’s US Postal Service team, written with Daniel Coyle, is a fascinating insight into the culture of systematic doping, in which Hamilton took part. Within a month of its publication, combined with the damning USADA report, Armstrong had been stripped of his Tour de France titles.

It was with this book in mind that we tried to do something a little different for Metro’s sports books round-up for 2012. We went for books that revealed secrets, that told us something unexpected. And to that end, The Secret Footballer and The Secret Olympian both deserved their place – books which spoke of what it’s really like to be a professional sportsman but could only do so behind a cloak of anoymity.

Elsewhere, I really liked Adharanand Finn’s Running With The Kenyans, in which the journalist and keen amateur runner tried to discover the ‘secrets of the fastest people on Earth’ by moving his entire family to Africa and forming a running club in Iten, where one in four are full-time athletes.

And the book which surprised me the most was Be Careful What You Wish For by ex-Crystal Palace chairman Simon Jordan. Jordan has always divided opinion but his memoir on how football really works in the boardroom is fascinating stuff. And it made me want to send a pitch to Delia Smith to ghost-write her own story of her Norwich City years…

Anyway, you can read the full feature in Metro here… except the box out with three other favourites of mine wasn’t published online. So here it is…

Richer Than God by David Conn
As extraordinary as Manchester City’s last minute, Premier League-winning goal was in May, it came with a oft-repeated caveat: that in spending nearly £1bn in four years, Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi had “bought” the league. Conn, a Manchester City fan himself, charts the bittersweet journey – but it’s a timely tale that any football fan of a certain age will recognise: that clubs followed like a religion are now hard-nosed businesses like any other.

The Dirtiest Race In History by Richard Moore
Richard Moore is a celebrated cycling writer by trade, but his focus this year was on athletics, and specifically the infamous 100m final at the Seoul Olympics of 1988. On Carl Lewis and Ben Johnson, two very different sprint rivals whose lives took spectacularly different trajectories. But Moore, interestingly, doesn’t take sides; this isn’t just about Johnson’s disgrace but the “skulduggery and corruption” surrounding the race – and in tracking down the protagonists, this fine book has the feel of a page-turning thriller.

Coppi by Herbie Sykes
Cycling literature is certainly in rude health right now, and the best looking sports book this year was surely Herbie Sykes’ coffee-table tome charting the exploits of Fausto Coppi. The pre-eminent mid-20th century Italian cyclist is the subject of many a biography – so wisely, Sykes lets his team-mates, rivals and some outstanding post-war photography do the talking. Admittedly, Sykes assumes a lot of knowledge, but, drawn in by Coppi’s film-star looks, it’s impossible not to want to know more about Il Campionissimo.

Click here to read Metro’s sports books of the year

Copy: The National, June 2012

>> Delighted to see “Norwich” author Anjali Joseph longlisted for the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize today for her second novel, Another Country. I call her a Norwich author because, well, she lives there now (and I met her at the lovely Franks Bar on Bedford Street when I interviewed her for The National), but in fact she was born in Mumbai, and has also lived in Paris and London – which are the three locations for the book.

It’s really good to see Joseph alongside the likes of Orhan Pamuk and the 2012 Booker-shortlisted novelists Tan Twan Eng and Jeet Thayil, because Another Country is neither an straightforward read nor simple to explain. Essentially, it tracks the protagonist Leela’s journey through her 20s as she moves between the three cities mentioned above (not Norwich!). But Leela is a strange, diffident, almost distressed soul who finds relationships difficult to maintain and self-confidence hard to come by. And her life doesn’t take place against the backdrop of great drama.

As I said in The National back in June, this absence of discernible narrative is a gamble, but hugely exciting as a piece of writing. Via Leela, Joseph explores the “stuff you don’t usually read about in novels”, such as the dull monotony of a dead relationship.

“It’s not heroic if your protagonist is having endless, petty, repetitive arguments,” she told me. “But we all have them, don’t we? I wanted to ask why we have them.”

Copy: The National, November 2012

>> The Turner Prize is obviously the most prestigious art prize in Britain, but Artes Mundi is certainly the most lucrative – the winner receiving £40,000. Focusing purely on financial reward, however, does this Cardiff-based competition a huge disservice. Unlike the Turner, this is a contemporary art prize with a global focus, and to that end, the seven finalists this year come from Sweden, Cuba, Slovenia, Lithuania, Mexico, the UK and India.

I went down to Cardiff last month for The National, as they were particularly interested in the Indian artist, Sheela Gowda. Her installation, Kagebangara, is one of the favourites for the prize, which is announced tomorrow. Comprising cylindrical tar drums sourced from Indian road workers arranged into columns,and flattened barrels hung along the wall next to bright yellow and blue tarpaulin, it’s possible to reflect on the piece as both a comment on migrant labour and a little tribute to Mondrian’s famous grid-based paintings.

Sheela Gowda

Oddly, when I spoke to Gowda, she wasn’t willing to make any real judgement on what her work means, fearful of making “superficial social comment”. But it is a powerful piece in a competition which has plenty of thought provoking entries – and a few less satisfying moments.

Teresa Margolles work, for example, is the most moving installation I’ve encountered in some time. A treatise on death and what mark it leaves, there is a bare tiled floor, once stained by the blood of a friend who was murdered. The hiss you hear as dripping water hits a hotplate is all the more arresting for its context: the water has been used to cleanse dead bodies in a Mexican morgue and thus the hiss is a cipher for the transition between life and death.

Teresa Margolles

Meanwhile, Miriam Backstrom’s tapestry is intriguing; a massive hall of mirrors which dissolves from the photographic image it first seems into something far more fragmented and unsettling. Finding the narrative in the piece is tough but rewarding – in fact, the gallery assistants call it a game.

Miriam Backstrom

And finding narratives is a key component in the single British entry from Phil Collins. His slide show of found family photographs is compelling stuff; you find yourself creating stories for these anonymous people, pondering your own photographs and what they might mean to a stranger.

It’s certainly a more profound idea than the other element to his show. Two caravans outside Chapter Arts Centre are screening his This Unfortunate Thing Between Us, which was originally commissioned by German television. The idea was to sell fantasies on a shopping channel (including a Stasi interrogation and a porn scene) and then get the public to purchase and act them out. All while Gruff Rhys from Super Furry Animals plays a suitably dark soundtrack. But it doesn’t really work: it just feels odd for odd’s sake.

Elsewhere, Lithuanian Darius Mikšys gathers together everything from a cricket ticket to a miner’s helmet in a strange room that only really makes sense when the idea is made clear: he deconstructed an essay on his work into search terms and then looked for those items in the National Museum Wales collection. It’s a neat idea but because too much is left unsaid it doesn’t quite hang together as a comment on what we keep or indeed what makes up Wales.

Talking of Wales, Slovenia’s Apolonija Sustersic’s video installation looks at the past, present and future of Cardiff Bay. It’s perhaps the crowd pleasing entry, but it’s slightly frustrating; there are some beautifully constructed sequences, and then there’s an interview seeming to come straight out of a regional news programme. And not a good regional news programme, before anyone asks.

Finally, Tania Bruguera investigates the lot of the immigrant in her work. But the poster campaign across Cardiff wasn’t up when I was there, and neither was the “moral commitment contract” gallery visitors are asked to sign. So, er, if she wins, I will either be amazed or look stupid.

Anyway, despite some misgivings, Artes Mundi is a fascinating survey of global art. My money’s on Teresa Margolles, with Gowda a close second.

Click here to read my interview with Sheela Gowda in The National

Copy: The Observer, November 2012

>> Blame The Killing. As anticipation built for the first instalment of the third season, I’d just finished reviewing Thomas E Kennedy’s Falling Sideways for The Observer. It was impossible not to feel that in some way Soren Sveistrup’s brilliant crime series had altered my expectations for drama set in Copenhagen. Kennedy’s book is by no means a police thriller – it’s a pretty timely look at what happens to people when they are in danger of losing their jobs (and all the more adept when you consider it was begun in the mid 1990s). But I was constantly waiting for one of the storylines to solidify into something more dramatic – and it never happened.

It got me thinking that popular culture can often completely alter perceptions of place. Baltimore, obviously, is The Wire, although I doubt whether the Maryland tourist board were that pleased. We once went on a trip to Finland on the sole basis that we liked an album by Husky Rescue, who are from Helsinki and sound suitably chilly.

And I’m sure that people come to Manchester looking for evidence of this crucial musical city. In fact, I know they do.

But, of course, Manchester isn’t really Madchester. The Hacienda is no more. The Free Trade Hall is a hotel. Liam and Noel Gallagher live in London. It’s becoming as much a slave to its heritage as Liverpool is with The Beatles – what these cities are like now is a lot more difficult to quantify.

So maybe comparing Thomas Kennedy’s book with The Killing was unfair. Impossible not to, though. How much are flights to Copenhagen again?

Click here to read my review of Falling Sideways by Thomas E Kennedy in The Observer

Copy: The Observer, October 2012

>> On Friday, Writers Centre Norwich host an evening focusing on Salt Publishing. Alongside the Writers Centre itself, which was instrumental in the successful UNESCO City Of Literature bid for Norwich, Salt must surely be one of Norfolk’s literary success stories this year. The small independent publishers based in Cromer were already finding that their high-quality catalogue was gaining traction as they moved more heavily into fiction, after years as predominantly a poetry publisher. And then Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse was shortlisted for The Booker Prize. Just last week she was also shortlisted in the New Writer Of The Year category at the 2012 Specsavers National Book Awards. It was a gamechanger for both author and publisher.

Of course, Moore isn’t a new writer exactly, she’s been chipping away at short stories since 2009 – in fact, she was nominated for the Manchester Fiction Prize that year, losing out to Toby Litt. Her debut novel was published in the summer and The Lighthouse is genuinely fantastic, a really unsettling but richly rewarding tale of  a middle aged man, Futh, who embarks on a contemplative German walking holiday after the break-up of his marriage – only to find himself more alienated than ever. There’s an atmospheric video trailer of it here.

She’s certainly my English new writer of the year – my American candidate being Kevin Powers, who I also interviewed recently for The National.

Anyway, in advance of her appearance in Norwich this week, here’s the ‘director’s cut’ of the Q&A I did for The Observer – we had a fascinating chat in a Didsbury cafe and it was a bit of a shame parts had to be cut for space. Afterwards, she also gave me a copy of her new chapbook published by Nightjar, and Small Animals is just as thoughtful, haunting and surprising. Amazing that a story that took the distance between East Didsbury and Manchester Piccadilly stations to read could make such an impact, but Moore is at the top of her game right now.

How has life changed since the Man Booker shortlisting? 

I was shocked enough that my publishers Salt told me that they’d entered the book, let alone for it to get this far. It’s become quite surreal. Somebody said that were it not for the Booker Prize not many people would know about my novel, and that’s not mean, it’s quite true. But it’s the interest in me which is so overwhelming. There are even negotiations for film rights now. I’d be fascinated to see somebody else’s angle on it – as long as they didn’t change the ending too much… and I’d love [Breaking Bad’s] Bryan Cranston to play Futh.

The observation usually made about your book is that it’s a simple tale but difficult to explain. 

I totally get that. I can give people a synopsis of a man separated from his wife who goes on a walking holiday, but it doesn’t necessarily give them the feel or the punch of the novel. And that’s how I write, actually; the first draft is ploughing through the story from beginning to end, and the redrafts start layering in the underbelly of the novel, its hints and echoes. Some of the difficulty for reviewers has also come from them not wanting to give away the ending, too, which has been very much appreciated.

Where did Futh come from? He invites sympathy, but sometimes he’s so unworldly, you want to shake him.

I know! I guess in one sense he’s calcified in childhood and he’s failed to mature. He’s not quite pinned down in either time or place – or connected to the world or home via a mobile phone – which adds to the idea of him coming adrift. I wanted to combine that with a sense of anxiety in social situations. For that part of him, it was about picking out the excruciating, bumbling bits of my own character, I suppose, and magnifying them.

And yet the quote on the front of the book is that The Lighthouse is “melancholy and haunting”.

Actually, I often made myself laugh when I was writing The Lighthouse – and I do think there is a tragicomic element to it. It’s not pure melancholy and I wasn’t at all sad when I wrote it; I had a very young child at the time and he was a lovely, happy baby.

The Lighthouse is, of course, officially recognised as one of the great books of 2012. What’s the last great book you read?

Not an obvious choice, maybe, but it’s Lionel Shriver’s So Much For That. She’s such a generous and brave writer and the ending was just heavenly. It’s very easy to hide behind your writing and Shriver never does that.

Have you read some of the other books on the Booker Prize list?

I have, yes. It’s funny – it’s been like a research project. Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home gave me a very vivid dream afterwards. Will Self’s book is amazing, it’s like a different creature altogether, and I’m reading Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis at the moment. There’s a wonderful range of books and styles.