British writer Jim Crace is the recipient of numerous literary awards, among them the Whitbread Book Award, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award.

Most notable are his novels Quarantine, which was judged Whitbread Novel of 1998 andshortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and his 2013 novel Harvest, which was also shortlisted for the Booker.

The author has just arrived in Malta as an affiliate professor of the University of Malta within the Faculty of Arts.

He will be Writer in Residence at the faculty until December 20 as part of its Creative Writing Programme, recently set up to promote excellence in creative writing across its different expressions.

During his residence, Crace will conduct seminars and workshops, give talks, share insights and generally act as mentor to aspiring and established writers.

How do you hope to make a difference to the writing scene in Malta?

That question is a hostage to fortune. I’m nervous about providing any answer because I’m an outsider to Malta, a brief visitor.

However, I have some modest ambitions. Firstly, I’m looking forward to meeting and working with some talented colleagues and engaging with their projects.

Secondly, I’m hoping to play a small and early part in establishing some new writing groups for younger writers.

Thirdly, and this is a hubristic admission, I’d like to think that the joy and stimulation I have experienced in my writing life can be handed on in some way while I am living in Malta.

I have learned over many years that writers can only benefit from getting together and talking.

The writing work itself is a solitary act. Maybe, my mission while I’m staying with you is to provide some testing and supportive meetings and some conversations and ambitions which survive long after I have returned to a much colder island than yours.

You have visited Malta once already as a guest of the Faculty of Arts and the British Council. What is it about the place that you find intriguing?

That British Council visit was my first to Malta. I was astounded by several things – the beauty and cordiality of the towns, its wealth of history, the rich botanic and bird life, the cultural intensity of a sea-locked and overcrowded nation which has its own language and traditions, but which has been deluged since the first days of cheap air-flights by the valuable but hazardous effects of tourism.

For a writer always on the look out for backdrops, these are all interesting themes. I came away toying with the idea of making Malta (or, at least, a disguised version of Malta) the background for a future novel.

I’d hope to do the place more justice than what is found in the works, for example of Nicholas Monsarrat and Anthony Burgess. But, let’s be honest, when a book is under way it tends to have irresistible opinions and prejudices of its own.

You have experience of how Creative Writing Programmes operate elsewhere, not least in the US. What would your thoughts be on a start up in this field like ours – what ought we to emulate, what ought we to be wary of?

Actually, I have just returned from teaching a week-long fiction workshop at Lumb Bank, Silvia Plath’s and Ted Hughes’s old farmhouse in Yorkshire, and so I have a fresh view of this question. Now I am freshly convinced that though genius cannot be taught, skill can.

Do you hope that the Maltese experience will give something back to you, both personally and as a writer?

This place and nation have fascinated me ever since the mid-1950s when Dom Mintoff was your PM and a bit of a socialist hero with my Labour Party father. I’m looking forward to being warmly stimulated. What writer could want more than that?

Is there any comment you would make on the correspondences between resonating with your readership and the recognition achieved through critical acclaim?

All I’d say is that whatever the weight of writer’s garlands and whatever the uncritical loyalty of a writer’s readers, the next book will be just as difficult and testing to complete.

So I try not to think too much about my own status or success. I count myself as very lucky, of course. But I don’t lead a public literary life. I keep my profile low.

My family certainly don’t want to talk about my books. My neighbours have no idea what I’ve done for a living. I’m not a celebrity in any way.

Good writing clearly still matters to a good many people. What are your thoughts on the state of the novel in the UK now and of its place in culture more broadly?

This is the scripture that I am always preaching. Human-kind is a narrative creature. That’s all humankind, not just that tiny portion who publish books.

We are all oral story tellers. That’s how we are successful socially. Nothing will change that. So we should not waste any energy worrying about the state of the published novel or, indeed, the form that fiction in the future might take, whether between covers or kindled on a screen, whether it is story-telling, theatre, or film. Narrative will never die.

But what are your views on the future of the publishing industry?

I’m personally glad that my career took place under the comfortable umbrella of conventional publishing. I’m not sure I could cope with the digital and the viral. But young writers will cope. I remember the fear that television professionals felt in the US when the cable channels came in. They all said that such democratisation of supply would dilute the quality of television programmes (in the same way that many older writers fear that unmonitored web-publishing will weaken the impact of fiction).

But they were wrong. Television in the US was liberated not diluted and the pay-off came in the form of glorious cable series such as The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad and Mad Men. We have every reason to feel excited rather than appalled.

How important, if at all, was your journalistic background in writing fiction?

I owe a lot to journalism, mostly the discipline of not making a fuss, not hiding behind the excuse of being betrayed by the muses or delayed by writer’s block.

Your most recent novel, Harvest, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013. Can you tell us something about the way it blends past and present, myths and realism?

In the case of Harvest, the fields around the cottage where we now live were the initial inspiration. The fact that the surviving ridges and furrows of medieval ploughing were physically beautiful but also records of an ugly dispossession.

That initial inspiration should logically have produced an historical novel about enclosures.

But I am interested in contemporary issues. It was only when I recognised that land seizure was not only a medieval English experience but a timeless experience still being repeated to this day, that I knew I had a relevant novel on my hands.

You have often described yourself as a landscape writer. How important was the English landscape as a source of inspiration in Harvest?

There could have been no novel without the land and humankind’s visceral attachment to it.

For much of my walking and exploring life, I have despised the English landscape for its lack of danger and drama.

But writing Harvest has helped me love it once again. English landscape may be short of wilderness but it is drenched in narrative.

Jim Crace will deliver a public reading on December 4 at 6pm at the Aula Magna, Old University Building, St Paul’s Street, Valletta. A book-signing session will follow the reading. For more information on the events organised by the Creative Writing Programme during the author’s residence send an e-mail to charlene.schiavone@um.edu.mt or call on 2340 3610.

Professor Gloria Lauri-Lucente is Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Arts.

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