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Now on BBC News it's time for Meet the Author. | :00:00. | :00:10. | |
France celebrated novelist to poet. Michel Faber's success has come in | :00:11. | :00:21. | |
many genres but after the death of his wife Eva, he decided to write a | :00:22. | :00:28. | |
book of poems, Undying: A Love Story., which follows the last | :00:29. | :00:31. | |
stages of her illness and describes the raw day by day process of his | :00:32. | :00:33. | |
own grief afterwards. Welcome. As a novelist, was it difficult to | :00:34. | :00:54. | |
commit yourself, especially under this very painful circumstances, to | :00:55. | :01:00. | |
a poetic form? I didn't feel I was committing myself to anything. In | :01:01. | :01:06. | |
the aftermath of either's death, these poems came to me. I had no | :01:07. | :01:12. | |
conception that I was going to put them out there. They were just | :01:13. | :01:16. | |
suggesting themselves to be written. It seemed perverse not to write | :01:17. | :01:19. | |
them, given that they were coming to me. I didn't feel that I would put | :01:20. | :01:26. | |
them out there, but when I started reading the mad at literary | :01:27. | :01:30. | |
festivals, I noticed that they were connecting with people and I thought | :01:31. | :01:33. | |
that maybe this was something which wasn't essentially private, maybe | :01:34. | :01:39. | |
they could be shared. Reading this very direct, Frank, sometimes brutal | :01:40. | :01:46. | |
poems was, in a strange sort of way, giving people consolation, because I | :01:47. | :01:49. | |
was talking about things which are almost forget -- forbidden to be | :01:50. | :01:51. | |
talking about. -- Even though there's a lot | :01:52. | :02:08. | |
of grieving poetry out there, it tends to be quite | :02:09. | :02:10. | |
decorous and, and beautiful. And you wanted some | :02:11. | :02:12. | |
of this to be raw. I wanted it to be | :02:13. | :02:15. | |
raw and, in fact, I I could have gone on writing | :02:16. | :02:17. | |
the poems until now. But I stopped writing | :02:18. | :02:21. | |
them at the end of 2015, because I felt | :02:22. | :02:23. | |
I'd the stage in my grieving where there | :02:24. | :02:25. | |
was a risk I would just write | :02:26. | :02:26. | |
a beautiful poem that happen to have grief | :02:27. | :02:28. | |
as its subject, rather | :02:29. | :02:30. | |
than feeling grief and needing to express it | :02:31. | :02:31. | |
in They were private expressions | :02:32. | :02:32. | |
of your own feelings, some kind of reassurance, | :02:33. | :02:35. | |
some kind of record, I suppose, But you'd always thought | :02:36. | :02:38. | |
of them are something Well, I have a long record | :02:39. | :02:44. | |
of writing things and not I wrote for 25 years | :02:45. | :02:49. | |
without submitting anything. So, yes, if I had thought | :02:50. | :02:54. | |
that they were just me talking to myself about what I had gone | :02:55. | :02:56. | |
through, I wouldn't There is anger in there, | :02:57. | :03:00. | |
there is unbearable sadness. And there are those | :03:01. | :03:05. | |
moments after your wife's death that everyone | :03:06. | :03:08. | |
will Things, for example, | :03:09. | :03:10. | |
like the death of a cat. Which takes you back in a weird | :03:11. | :03:18. | |
way to your human loss. And it's the kind | :03:19. | :03:22. | |
of thing people think about but don't often say, | :03:23. | :03:25. | |
let alone write down. The poem that was particularly | :03:26. | :03:29. | |
significant on that level is... There is a poem | :03:30. | :03:43. | |
called You Were Ugly. Which talks about what happened | :03:44. | :03:45. | |
to her body as a result of And that's a taboo, you're really | :03:46. | :03:48. | |
not allowed in our... And when I read that poem out | :03:49. | :03:51. | |
on the radio about a year ago, someone phoned in the radio | :03:52. | :04:00. | |
station and said, look, I'm not But I am consoled that | :04:01. | :04:02. | |
someone has expressed this thing which I've | :04:03. | :04:12. | |
been thinking and felt that I wasn't allowed to | :04:13. | :04:16. | |
think. Will this take you into | :04:17. | :04:17. | |
poetry as a medium? No, this will be the only book | :04:18. | :04:20. | |
of poetry that I write. I'm under no illusions | :04:21. | :04:25. | |
that I'm a good enough poet to write | :04:26. | :04:29. | |
poems about anything Does that mean that | :04:30. | :04:33. | |
you will return to fiction? As you say, you had a long | :04:34. | :04:38. | |
period where you didn't You know, you're sort | :04:39. | :04:44. | |
of famously almost reclusive as a writer in that | :04:45. | :04:48. | |
sense, for a long time. Will this have that same | :04:49. | :04:55. | |
effect on you or not? Well, when Eva was ill, | :04:56. | :04:58. | |
and she knew she was going to die, she was very, very | :04:59. | :05:02. | |
upset with my decision, which I had already made, that I would | :05:03. | :05:06. | |
write no more novels. But I would be astonished | :05:07. | :05:09. | |
if I wrote another novel for I do want to write | :05:10. | :05:17. | |
a novel for children. It's something I | :05:18. | :05:21. | |
haven't done before. With each book I wanted to do | :05:22. | :05:24. | |
something that I have I also think that in the world | :05:25. | :05:26. | |
as it currently is, a There are writers, | :05:27. | :05:34. | |
thinking earlier about Thomas Hardy, who lived | :05:35. | :05:46. | |
to the late 20s, but wrote his last novel | :05:47. | :05:51. | |
in the mid-1890s, and spent the rest | :05:52. | :05:54. | |
of his life writing poetry. No, you say you're not | :05:55. | :05:57. | |
going to do another novel, another volume of poetry, | :05:58. | :06:00. | |
but it does seem as if the moment you've reached in your fiction | :06:01. | :06:05. | |
writing and with this break, because | :06:06. | :06:08. | |
of the circumstances you find yourself in, | :06:09. | :06:10. | |
it is time for something completely And something I also want to do | :06:11. | :06:13. | |
is figure out whether I can I'm so used to | :06:14. | :06:21. | |
inhabiting that little sanctum sanctorum and | :06:22. | :06:28. | |
creating works of art, which is an alternative to hanging | :06:29. | :06:34. | |
out with real human beings things that ordinary | :06:35. | :06:36. | |
people know how to do. When you're not writing, when you're | :06:37. | :06:42. | |
not sitting in that quiet I will occasionally read | :06:43. | :06:45. | |
a book about music. It's an extraordinary thing to hear, | :06:46. | :06:52. | |
in a writer of your celebrity and accomplishment, | :06:53. | :07:05. | |
saying he no longer reads fiction. Do you ever feel guilty | :07:06. | :07:09. | |
about that or is It makes, in some ways | :07:10. | :07:12. | |
it makes things a lot easier because it means when I meet | :07:13. | :07:19. | |
another writer and I haven't met their work, haven't read their work, | :07:20. | :07:22. | |
it's not that I'm choosing You can say I haven't read | :07:23. | :07:24. | |
anybody else's either. I haven't read anybody | :07:25. | :07:28. | |
else's either. So that's a sort of | :07:29. | :07:29. | |
socially convenient. But maybe in the future | :07:30. | :07:31. | |
I would like to become the sort of So whether you're writing | :07:32. | :07:34. | |
poetry in the sadness after your wife's death, | :07:35. | :07:42. | |
or whether you are contemplating a move to | :07:43. | :07:47. | |
fiction for young people, or listening to music, you're always, | :07:48. | :07:51. | |
finally, looking for a new horizon. Yes, but maybe the ultimate | :07:52. | :07:55. | |
new horizon is to become Because that has been | :07:56. | :08:00. | |
my mission in a way. Because I started off very, | :08:01. | :08:06. | |
very alienated, very strange. And I didn't want to | :08:07. | :08:13. | |
become an alienated It's frightening in a way | :08:14. | :08:17. | |
for me to become more connected, because as you become | :08:18. | :08:23. | |
more connected with other people, And if you're a solitary fringe | :08:24. | :08:28. | |
dweller, you're protected Whereas once you welcome these | :08:29. | :08:38. | |
people in, life is harsh. But it's a risk | :08:39. | :08:44. | |
you feel you now have I feel it's a risk | :08:45. | :08:46. | |
I now have to take. Well, not have to take, | :08:47. | :08:49. | |
but want to take. Michel Faber, author | :08:50. | :08:52. | |
of Undying: A Love | :08:53. | :08:56. |