Carnegie of Carnegies

It's been announced that Philip Pullman's Northern Lights has won the Carnegie of Carnegies (about which I posted in April). I confess, I voted for Alan Garner's The Owl Service, simply because it had such a huge impact on me as a child reader.




(I confess that I heard this news late yesterday but I was trying to work on both my current fiction tales (simultaneously more or less), so I didn't post it !)

Interview with Alan Garner

The Guardian has an interview with Alan Garner in their "Why I Write" series. As I've mentioned here before I read his The Owl Service at school and it scared me so much it took me over 25 years to go back and re-read it, and then I couldn't stop reading his books (you'll find reviews of nearly all his books somewhere or other on this Blog). I also went to hear him speak at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature last October, which was a fascinating treat. Anyway this brief interview is interesting. I particularly liked the following two exchanges:

What advice would you give to new writers?
AG: Get on with it and don't ask for any advice. If you are going to write, nothing will stop you and if you are not going to write, nothing will make you.

What do you need to write?
AG: Dedication, without compromise.

I've had friends comment on the amount of time I devote to my writing (both non-fiction and fiction) - and my response has always been along similar lines to Garner's - if you want to do a thing well you have to practice and practice and practice - and that means dedicating yourself to it (be it writing, playing the sax, painting or whatever) 110% as far as I'm concerned.

The Owl Service - Alan Garner

I first read Alan Garner's The Owl Service as a child and I remember that it scared me silly, so it was with some trepidation that I picked it up this morning to re-read it. However, I need not have worried - there's no doubt it's a peculiar story - but I didn't find it scary. Perhaps because I've read more mythological works since I originally read it aged about 9 or 10.

Garner takes a tale from the Welsh Mabinogion, that of Bloduwedd, and re-works it into a more modern setting (the book is actually set in the 1960s). Bloduwedd was a woman made from flowers by Gwydion to marry his nephew Lleu. She later betrayed her husband with a lover and for that was punished by being turned into an owl. This "love triangle" is played out relentlessly in the valley in which Garner's characters are currently holidaying. I'm not going to try to explain the ins and outs of the story as it's quite complicated, instead I'll just point you in the direction of Kimberly Bates' Greeen Man Review of the book.

If you're interested in Alan Garner, there are articles and interviews on Robert Mapson's comprehensive The Unofficial Alan Garner site. I've got The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, plus The Stone Book Quartet and The Voice Than Thunders to read yet, so I shall definitely be reading more of Robert Mapson's site.