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Al-Ahram Weekly 14 - 20 October 1999 Issue No. 451 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 14 - 20 October 1999 Issue No. 451
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Books Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
A book I impatiently await is New Writing, an annual anthology published by Vintage in association with the British Council. The aim of this publication is to promote the best in contemporary English literature. The anthology is a means to bring together "some of our most formidable talent, placing new names alongside more established ones, and includes poetry, essays, short stories and extracts from novels in progress".
What is really interesting about this annual anthology is the fact that every year different editors are chosen, which guarantees a degree of variety. The idea of the anthology was the brain-child of the British Council Literature Department, and is aimed at stimulating interest in new English writing both inside Britain and abroad. There is no doubt that the anthology, with its varied contributions, gives a multi-faceted picture of contemporary British life and thought.
The two current editors are Tibor Ficher, whose first novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993, and Lawrence Norfolk, the author of two novels. Both editors are under 40 and in going through the biographical notes on contributors one sees that the average age of most of them is the same as the editors, though there are, naturally, some well established including Salman Rushdi and A S Byatt.
According to the editors they received a little over 600 pieces in all. They read the manuscripts over one year and the problem facing them was "finding enough pages that we could bear to print". For them the excitement was that they were the first to read the submitted works. None had read them before. That was the novelty but also the responsibility. They had to read every single line and when the novelty wore off, they had to trudge on. Some of the manuscripts were mediocre, which they thought was more depressing "than the frankly atrocious".
The anthology is 574 pages long but according to the editors it could have been 800. The editors come up with some interesting ideas about writing. Writing, they discovered, was "a sheep and goat business". There were those who could write and those who could not and nothing between.
The brief for New Writing is to give a snap shot of what has been happening in British literature over a one year period. They tried to include different works, from the experimental to mass-market writing. "The former," they claim "is admired in theory and ignored in practice. The latter is read avidly and yet denigrated by critics who are impotent in the face of its appeal to ordinary readers."
This is an interesting point which has similarities with the situation in Egypt. A number of writers have achieved great popularity but are denigrated by critics. But to go back to the eighth edition of New Writing. Going through the contributions one cannot but notice the near absence of non-British writers in English. Previous anthologies had quite a number of works by Commonwealth writers, something missing in this volume. I thought that it was a victory for the English language to have non Britishers write in it. In fact the Booker Prize went last year to an Indian and this year there is an Egyptian novelist short-listed. But there are essays about places other than Britain. There are essays about Algiers and Ulan Bator, Mongolia, which goes to show the breadth of interest of British writers. The most experimental works were the poems. According to the editors: "In poetry the ironic and allusive predominated over the declamatory, and the fabular trumped the straightforward descriptive."
Going through the anthology one gets the general impression that contemporary writers have chosen to seek out new challenges. As the editors put it: "In turn the diversity of what they [the writers] have surveyed and logged speaks well of this country as a cultural entrepot, a place of flux and reflux, differently but intricately connected to both Europe and the United States, historically and more problematically to the Indian subcontinent and Africa. Plenty of grist still passes through the mill called Britain."
