Sunday, May 10, 2009

Hilary Mantel

From Hilary Mantel's Q & A with Anna Metcalfe, in the Financial Times:

What book do you wish you’d written?

Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour. There’s not a word out of place. It ripples with irony and it’s very funny.

What was the first novel you read?

I remember the day I was first given adult tickets for the local library when I was 14. I borrowed Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. I had been longing for adult books and been seething for years because I only had access to school books.

What are you most proud of writing?

A book I wrote in my twenties called A Place of Greater Safety about the French revolution. It wasn’t published as my first book but as my fifth. I wrote it against the odds as nobody except me believed in it.
Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue