Samantha Harvey Author: Samantha Harvey was born in London, United Kingdom, on this day in 1975. She has lived in Ireland, New Zealand, and Japan, writing, traveling, and teaching, and, in addition to her novel writing, she has just co-founded an environmental charity. She went on to get her MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University, where she graduated with honors in 2005, after earning her master’s in Philosophy.
THE WILDERNESS was her critically praised debut novel, which won the Betty Trask Prize and was on the Man Booker Prize longlist. It was considered for a finalist place in both the Orange Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. Jonathan Cape published ‘All Is Sing in January 2012, and it received a lot of positive feedback from critics. DEAR THIEF (Jonathan Cape and HarperCollins in the US) was her third novel, published in 2014. The James Tait Black Prize 2015, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction all had it on their shortlists. The paperback edition of THE WESTERN WIND, published by Jonathan Cape in early March 2018, was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2019 and Waterstones Fiction Book of the Month for March 2019.
Her short stories have been broadcast on Granta Magazine and BBC Radio 4; Harvey’s novels have been nominated for numerous accolades, including the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. In 2010, she was named one of the 12 greatest new British novelists by The Culture Show. The Staunch Book Prize was given to The Western Wind in 2019 for its literary achievements. She is a member of the Rathbones Folio Prize Academy and teaches the MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She served on the jury for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2016.
Career
The narrator in her first novel, The Wilderness (2009), is a man with Alzheimer’s disease who narrates the disease’s effects on his life in gradually fragmented prose. All Is Song (2012), the author’s second book, is a moral and filial duties story that explores the tension between questioning and conforming. According to the novelist, it is loosely based on the author’s personal experiences and interpretation of Socrates’ life.
Dear Thief, a long letter from a woman to a distant acquaintance, describes the emotional consequences of a love triangle. The story is claimed to have been inspired by the song Famous Blue Raincoat. It was published in 2014 by Jonathan Cape. In March of this year, she published The Western Wind, a novel set in the fifteenth century about a Somerset priest.
There are a variety of other jobs available in addition to these.
- Examiner for PhDs at the Universities of Exeter and East Anglia (UEA).
- This article was written by Arvon Tutor.
- A former instructor at Toronto’s Humber College School of Writing.
- Expertise in a variety of fields
- Works of fiction
- Philosophy-based fiction (how to write ideas into novels)
- stories that focus on the characters
- Writing on one’s memory’s inaccuracy
- Narrators who aren’t reliable.
- Research supervision in a variety of fields
Sam is interested in mentoring graduate students in philosophical fiction, literary fiction, and stories that investigate or play with the concepts of time and memory.
- Guest lectures and invited talks
- The Edinburgh Book Festival takes place every year.
- Bath hosts a literary festival.
- The Toronto Authors Festival is a yearly event held in the city of Toronto.
- Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, hosts the International Beckett Festival.
- London’s Literature Festival
- Keynote Address at Abbeyfield Symposium on Spirituality and Older People (Windsor Castle)
- “The Challenges of Writing the Novel,” a talk at Toronto’s Humber School of Writing.
Press
Received reviews: Guardian, Independent, Times, Telegraph, Scotsman, Daily Mail, New Yorker, Washington Post, and New York Times; Wrote reviews/articles/essays: New Yorker, Guardian, and numerous online magazines. The Guardian, Independent, Times, Telegraph, Scotsman, and Daily Mail all have print editions.
- I’ve appeared on CBC Writers and Company (Canada), Talk Radio Europe, and a number of local BBC stations, as well as RTE in Ireland (Spain)
- BBC Culture Show; CBC Canada on CBC
- Academic and research projects’ outcomes
Authors who influenced you when you were a kid?
It’s unclear whether any of the books I read as a kid can be termed “literary inspirations,” although I did read a lot. These things began to happen to me while I was in my twenties. Some of the authors whose works have impacted Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, Milan Kundera, Thomas Hardy include Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Mary Webb, Graham Greene, Victor Hugo, and John Wyndham. Back in college, a lot of novels used to take my breath away, but that has faded with time. Even still, there are some people who never cease to astound me. Is there a chance they’ll have an effect? I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
Still, Life by A.S. Byatt and Waterland by Swift are two of my favorites. I was intrigued by their stories when I was in my early twenties and hoped to follow in their footsteps. That’s when I realized I’d like to try my hand at writing. That fascinates me. Anyone who enjoys reading should read this book. Is it possible that you were able to completely immerse yourself in the 15th century? Clearly, a great deal of effort has gone into this.
Book
“A year of not sleeping: the shapeless discomfort,” says the author. Harvey, S. (2020). 9781787332027 is the ISBN number for Jonathan Cape’s book. ‘The Western Wind,’ Harvey’s fourth novel, is a medieval detective story, which is perhaps relevant given her competence in unraveling mental states and narratives.’ Given his expertise and humanity, you’d expect nothing less from Harvey than someone who wrote The Wilderness. Concerns about the ephemeral nature of happiness, as well as the “drama of failure,” as described by reviewer Gaby Wood, are recurrent themes in her work. Reve’s door is open to everything human, including the villagers’ more medieval excesses of behavior and religion, such as European animal mask rites reminiscent of an Axel Hoedt painting.
Her work is still as elegant and well-structured as it was when she first published it all those years ago. Even if we had predicted anything from the start, the revelation is so gradual and cumulative that we can’t put the book down for fear of being wrong. It’s a compelling mystery with an unpredictable flurry of twists in the last chapters; a terrifyingly subtle exploration of a long-term moral collapse; and a wonderfully designed and interwoven allegory for Britain’s altering connections with Europe. It’s a novel about people’s grace, yet that’s not its main subject.
About Point Of View
I am grateful for your time. I had to do a lot of research before I could start writing. I hadn’t planned on writing a novel set in the 15th century, so I was entirely unprepared when the opportunity arrived. I started with the Usborne Children’s Illustrated Guide to the Middle Ages and worked my way up from there.
First, I concentrated on a specific period of time and location, as well as specific situations and subjects. Following that, I began conducting more detailed and precise research, which I continued to do throughout the novel’s three revisions. Writing and conducting research together is, in many ways, a creative dance in and of itself. A new chapter in your story begins when you discover a fact. You’ll discover fresh possibilities as you go deeper into the information you’ll need to flesh out your characters and situations. The challenge of research is to find the appropriate moment to stop and reassure yourself that you’ve studied enough to know that your universe is true.
Do you have anything you’d like to say to the patrons of the Suffolk County Public Library: Thank you for utilizing the library as a resource! I’m writing this in a public library, and libraries, it seems to me, are a decent measure of a society’s level of civility. They give everyone who wants to use them unrestricted access to resources and space. We may be clinging to life by a thread, but we are still here for the time being.
