EIBF: "Dont get it right, get it written"

In my seat, giddy with anticipation, I sat very much on the thin line between impassioned admirer and obsessive-compulsive-fanatic. Hanif Kureishi is my literary idol. This is no overstatement. He is an exceptional writer, and has a brilliant knack for creating characters, envisaging scenarios, grasping emotions, and transforming these cocktails into exquisitely constructed works of art. And my God, is he smooth. A literary sex icon, Hanif lives up to his reputation with his dapper outfit, wry wit, and blasé smirk – and of course a reading of an explicitly sexual extract from his new published anthology Collected Stories.

Kureishi went on to talk about the process of writing. From the extraordinary discipline required to be a writer—“I can’t afford writer’s block. To hell with the block, you just have to get on with it.” I was particularly struck by his suggestion that in order to truly capture a moment, you should write in the moment – often, twiddling and tweaking and editing over a long period of time results in the writing losing its immediacy and its authenticity.

He also spoke about the changing face of Britain. Bromley, the suburb in which he grew up, was violently racist, and Kureishi described the experience of regular nightmares and humiliation. To go from there to the theatre was a relief and gave him a real sense of liberation. It was at the Royal Court Theatre where Kureishi said he received his real education – even his school teachers in Bromley were unashamedly racist. But heclaims that the Britain of today is not the Britain of his youth. People don’t hate David Cameron as much as they hated Thatcher, he points out. When he started out writing film and TV scripts, producers would love the script, but object to the fact that protagonists were Indian. Why can’t they be English? – they’d ask. There was no Naipaul or Rusdhie in those days - Kureishi belongs to the first generation of “ethnic” writers.

But now, he remarks, “we are living in a country where nearly all the fiction writers are Pakistani or Indian – as indeed are all the newsreaders.” Britain is creative with its art, he argues, much more that European countries which still tend to be rather conventional. And art should be creative, should be bold, should be dangerous. “The more it frightens people, the better it is,” he vouches . I couldn’t help but agree. It is art like Hanif’s, that has changed the face of Britain for good. You can read my interview with him here

 

Next up was Elaine C Smith, one of Scotland’s best loved actresses; a delicious cocktail of drama and feminism, beauty and bustiness, politics and comedy, confidence and self-deprecation. She had it all. And yet she hilariously describes herself as “the wee dumpy one at the end”. If one quote could epitomize the nature of this talk, it would be:

“I demand the right to talk as much pish about football as men do.”

As it happens, she said a whole lot more. Her book, Nothing Like a Dame, is remarkably feminist, but militant it is not. Her readings from it were accessible and relentlessly funny. And it wasn’t simply man bashing; she criticized women too, for what she termed the “lobster pot mentality” where women police each other, or as the analogy goes, drag each other back into the boiling pot.

Smith is very politically active and staunchly aligned with the SNP- commending First Minister Alex Salmond for his achievements in government. It’s not about anti-Englishness, she clarifies, it’s about being proud to be Scottish. She also proceeded to explain how Westminster has failed to improve the lives of many people in Scotland. It’s unacceptable, Smith fumed, that there are places in Glasgow where the average life expectancy for men is 58.

Her book also talks about grief, about losing her mother, about her sister’s cancer, about the process of bereavement, and healing. Yet, ever positive, Smith adds tenderly, that her mother taught her how to die with dignity and love. It was a difficult book to write for many reasons including her personal loss, but at the end of the day, the best piece of advice she was ever given was “don’t get it right, get it written” – and she proceeded to stick by that axiom stringently.