RSSFollowing Boyd Tonkin’s “Does the Credit Crunch Have a Silver Lining For Literature?” article which appeared in The Independent on Friday 9 January 2009, several publishers and writers were asked the following question: “Safety or audacity? Writers and publishers on the prospects for fiction in a slump”. Here is Tom’s response:
Tom McCarthy
Novelist & critic
I expect the recession will accelerate an already well-established pattern: mainstream publishers will concentrate on promoting non-fiction by television presenters and commercial fiction by creative-writing graduates (which should never have been confused with literature in the first place). People wanting to engage seriously in literature will have to look to other arenas: the art world and its publication networks, for example — at least until their work has found a large enough audience to make it commercially attractive to bigger houses. While this may be bad news for writers’ bank balances, it’s not necessarily a bad thing for literature, which has always “deterritorialised” itself, had to detour beyond its own boundaries, in order to be reinvigorated. The internet has produced some excellent criticism and debate around literature, but I’ve yet to see any good “primary” writing on there.