'How did I end up becoming a novelist?'
Known for his discretion, Graham Swift is at last confronting his own past,

writes Edward Marriott in The Observer, Sunday 1 March 2009

Author Graham Swift photographed in Fulham last month Photograph: Karen Robinson

In 1983, Graham Swift, with Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie, was named by Granta as one of Britain's best young novelists. While the others have gone on to enjoy stellar careers, Swift's trajectory, like the man himself, has been more enigmatic, even fragile.

After the Booker-winning heights of Last Orders in 1996, he's going through one of his quieter periods, which may account for the fact that, at the age of 59, he's about to publish his first work of non-fiction, Making an Elephant. For a writer with a reputation for distinctly un-Amisian levels of discretion, this is the closest he's ever got to an autobiography.

For Swift, Making an Elephant is quite a departure. It's revealing, self-deprecating, full of fascinating details. There are pieces about friends - Salman Rushdie, who used to bring along his Special Branch bodyguards for fatwa-era Christmases with Swift and his wife, writer Candice Rodd; Kazuo Ishiguro; Ted Hughes - and memoirs of parents and childhood. Throughout the book, an unspoken question rings out: "What made me a writer?"

By his own admission, Swift was one of literature's slow starters. A seemingly perennial student, with an English degree from Cambridge and three further years "posing as a PhD candidate" in York, he'd gone to Greece at the age of 25 in the hope of transforming himself into a writer. A year later, he returned home and got out his manuscript: "It was awful. Irredeemably awful."
It's at this point that many would-be writers, having dipped their toes in the all-too-exposing waters of fiction, might have mothballed their dream in favour of a sensible job. But Swift, "contrary to the immediate evidence", was convinced that he had what it took. He taught adult evening classes in English and began rising at 5.30am to write. It would be another six years before the publication of his first novel, The Sweet-Shop Owner.

Cross to The Observer for the rest of this story.