Blake Morrison

Anna Metcalfe of the Financial Times interviewed Yorkshire-born writer, poet and journalist Blake Morrison, author of the acclaimed memoir, And When Did You Last See Your Father?.

One exchange from the Q & A:

What book changed your life?

Wilfred Owen’s Collected Poems. As a teenager I sat up reading them late at night in a tearful, morbid way. They showed me that writing could move people.

Read the full Q & A.

About And When Did You Last See Your Father?, from the publisher:

Soon to be a major motion picture, directed by Anand Tucker and starring Colin Firth and Jim Broadbent

And when did you last see your father? Was it last weekend or last Christmas? Was it before or after he exhaled his last breath? And was it him really, or was it a version of him, shaped by your own expectations and disappointments?

Blake Morrison's subject is universal: the life and death of a parent, a father at once beloved and exasperating, charming and infuriating, domineering and terribly vulnerable. In reading about Dr. Arthur Morrison, we come to ask ourselves the same searching questions that Blake Morrison poses: Can we ever see our parents as themselves, or are they forever defined through a child's eyes? What are the secrets of their lives, and why do they spare us that knowledge? And when they die, what do they take with them that cannot be recovered or inherited?

--Marshal Zeringue