Background
SWIFT, Graham was born on May 4, 1949 in London. Son of Lionel Allan Stanley Swift and Sheila Irene (née Bourne) Swift.
(The Sweet-Shop Owner is set during a single June day in t...)
The Sweet-Shop Owner is set during a single June day in the life of an outwardly unremarkable man whose inner world proves to be exceptionally resonant. As he tends to his customers, Willy Chapman, the sweet-shop owner, confronts the specters of his beautiful and distant wife and his clever, angry daughter, the history through which he has passed, and the great, unrequited passion that has tormented him for forty years.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679739807/?tag=2022091-20
(Set in the bleak Fen Country of East Anglia, and spanning...)
Set in the bleak Fen Country of East Anglia, and spanning some 240 years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his ancestors, Waterland is a book that takes in eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history and a family romance as tormented as any in Greek tragedy. "Waterland, like the Hardy novels, carries with all else a profound knowledge of a people, a place, and their interweaving.... Swift tells his tale with wonderful contemporary verve and verbal felicity.... A fine and original work."--Los Angeles Times
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679739793/?tag=2022091-20
(In Waterland, Tom Crick, a history teacher in the Fenland...)
In Waterland, Tom Crick, a history teacher in the Fenlands, is driven by a marital crisis and the provocation of one of his pupils to forsake his teaching and relate the story of his family, who have lived in the Fens since the eighteenth century. In Last Orders, four men once close to jack Dodds, a London butcher, meet to carry out his peculiar last wish: to have his ashes scattered into the sea. For reasons best known to herself, Jack's widow, Amy, declines to join them. On the surface the tale of a simple if increasingly bizarre day's outing, Last Orders is Graham Swift's most poignant exploration of the complexity and courage of ordinary lives.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0330481436/?tag=2022091-20
SWIFT, Graham was born on May 4, 1949 in London. Son of Lionel Allan Stanley Swift and Sheila Irene (née Bourne) Swift.
Bachelor, Cambridge University, 1970. Master of Arts, Cambridge University, 1975. Doctorate (honorary), University York, 1998.
Doctor of Letters (honorary), University East Anglia, 1998. Doctor of Letters (honorary), University London, 2003.
Some of Swift's books have been filmed, including Last Orders, starring Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins and Waterland, starring Jeremy Irons. Waterland is set in The Fens. A novel of landscape, history and family, it is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English literature syllabus in British schools.
Writer Patrick McGrath asked Swift about the “feeling for magic” in Waterland during an interview. Swift responds that “The phrase everybody comes up with is magic realism, which I think has now become a little tired. But on the other hand there’s no doubt that English writers of my generation have been very much influenced by writers from outside who in one way or another have got this magical, surreal quality, such as Borges, Márquez, Grass, and that that has been stimulating.
I think in general it’s been a good thing. Because we are, as ever, terribly parochial, self-absorbed and isolated, culturally, in this country. It’s about time we began to absorb things from outside."
Swift was acquainted with Ted Hughes and has himself published poetry, some of which is included in Making an Elephant: Writing from Within (2009).
(Set in the bleak Fen Country of East Anglia, and spanning...)
(In Waterland, Tom Crick, a history teacher in the Fenland...)
(The Sweet-Shop Owner is set during a single June day in t...)
(Book by Swift, Graham)