Literary Birthday – 5 July – Scarlett Thomas

Happy Birthday, Scarlett Thomas, born on 5 July 1972.

Scarlett Thomas Quotes

1. In those early days, I would spend a long time trying to summon up the courage to go through the Writer and Artists handbook and telephone agents, who would mostly answer their phones themselves. Or an assistant would answer, and then you’d have twenty seconds to pitch your work and tell them that you had a book and ask them what they read. (The Young Writer Award)
2. The best work always has a sense of urgency. (The Young Writer Award)
3. I think you have to feel like you completely 100% believe in what you’ve done, and that if you were in the agent’s position, that you would be desperate to take this project on yourself. If you don’t believe in what you’ve done, then nobody else will. (The Young Writer Award)
4. But it turns out that creating a fictional world is a very complex act. Who has power? How does magic work? Is everyone magical or are some people born muggles? As soon as you put your characters in large country houses with magical-looking turrets you have to decide how these houses are to be maintained. A feudal world looks pretty, but needs servants. What do you do if you don’t believe in servants? And what do you do about violence once you’ve given your children magical weapons? Solving these problems puts you in touch with the very core of your beliefs. You can lie to adults and call it “irony”. Lying to children is a different matter. (The Guardian)
5. I am abandoning my old classification of books. Instead of thinking there’s “literary fiction” and “everything else”, or even adult fiction and children’s fiction, I now believe that there are books with magic and without. And I much prefer them with, thank you very much. (The Guardian)

Scarlett Thomas is an English author who writes contemporary postmodern fiction. She has published ten novels, including The End of Mr. Y and PopCo, as well as the Worldquake series of children’s books, and Monkeys With Typewriters, a book on how to unlock the power of storytelling. Her first three novels feature Lily Pascale, an English literature lecturer who solves murder mysteries. She is Professor of Creative Writing & Contemporary Fiction at the University of Kent. She reviews books for the Literary Review, the Independent on Sunday, and Scotland on Sunday. Follow her on Instagram.

Source for photograph: Litfest, Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scarlett_Thomas,_2006.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: Literary Birthday Calendar