Author Birthday – 18 October – Lucy Ellmann

Happy Birthday, Lucy Ellmann, born on 18 October 1956.

Lucy Ellmann Quotes

1. I write spasmodically, in fits and starts. I wish it were easier but it’s agony, actually! I used to think that made me not a real writer. Now I accept I am a writer, just not a very relaxed one. (Hingston and Olsen)
2. You can go kind of crazy, in ways that might not be sustainable in a novel. [Short] stories are a place to play with some of your wackier ideas. (Hingston and Olsen)
3. Novels take all the time you have in the world. People try to circumvent the intangibility of novel-writing by setting themselves to write 500 words a day, or 1,000 words a day, or 2,000. This is fine if you like that sort of thing, but it doesn’t guarantee you’ll have a good book at the end of it. (The Adroit Journal)
4. I do think women need to take up more space, more territory. Be loud. We’ve heard enough from men by now, and Trump is the final straw. The size of my book has perturbed some male critics. Which just proves my point. This book really doesn’t take up much space compared to the horrors men have produced, the mess they’ve made of the environment. They’ve messed with our heads as well. (The Adroit Journal)
5. When I first started out as a novelist, and often over the years since, I sometimes hoped I could create a formula that worked—there must be an easier way! one wails. But I’ve now reached the conclusion that novels need to be organic masses, heaving themselves where they will. (The Adroit Journal)
6. I think we’re all adults, and capable of much more adventurous reading than we’re usually offered. I sense people are hungry for something new, and sick of fiction that lazily kowtows to the reader or, God help us, the ‘market’. Anyone who thinks writing is easy really isn’t trying hard enough. (The Guardian)
7. I don’t read much contemporary writing. I’m more interested in how people thought before the atom bomb debased us all. (TLS)
8. My perpetual literary influences are Jane Austen and Thomas Bernhard. Rage is detectable in both. Not an overt rage, as in Dickens or Orwell, just free-floating fury, closely allied to wit. Rage is creative fuel. (Stromness)

Lucy Ellmann is an American novelist who has spent most of her life in Britain. She writes literary and experimental fiction, often using humour, satire, and stream-of-consciousness narration. Her work explores family life, motherhood, relationships, gender inequality, politics, violence, and environmental concerns. Her first novel, Sweet Desserts, won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1988. Her eight book, Ducks, Newburyport, was shortlisted for the Booker, won the Goldsmiths Prize, and the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. Her latest book is a collection of satirical essays, Things Are Against Us. She has been a Hawthornden Fellow, a tutor for the Arvon Foundation, and for three years was Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Kent. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 2025.

Source for photograph: rsliterature

by Amanda Patterson
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