Jon McGregor
In February 2008 and February 2010 I interviewed the novelist Jon McGregor whose first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (Bloomsbury 2002), had been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and which was awarded the Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award in 2003. Jon had recently published his second novel So Many Ways to Begin (Bloomsbury 2006) when I first met him at the pioneering Nottingham Writers Studio, and we met again shortly after the publication of his third novel, Even the Dogs (Bloomsbury 2010).
The full-length interviews were published in an article for the American journal Contemporary Literature, and a shorter interview was published in the New Statesman. Jon was also kind enough to mention these publications on his website.
See below to preview a green open access pre-print version of the Contemporary Literature article, or click here to download the pdf.
Thumbnail image by PhotoGraham under a CC BY-NC-SA license.
Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research and teaching specialisms are in 21st century literature and critical theory, science fiction and post-apocalyptic narratives, Marxist aesthetics, and utopianism.
Dear Caroline,
I am a lecturer in English literature at the University of Toulouse, France. I am initially a Lawrence Durrell scholar and have, since my PhD, been working on V. S. Naipaul and Jon McGregor. I published an essay on "So Many Ways" in 2011. I am presently working on a research project including Jon McGregor's fiction. I would be very interested in reading your 2010 full length interview of him, if you do not mind sharing it by email.
Best wishes,
Isabelle
Dear Isabelle,
Many thanks for getting in touch and great to hear that you’re also working on Jon McGregor! The article is available via the journal Contemporary Literature (see here: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cli/summary/v051/51.2.edwards.html) and I’d be happy to email it privately to you. If you email my Birkbeck address (caroline.edwards@bbk.ac.uk) to let me know which is your preferred email address, I can send it over.
All the best, Caroline.