Left - From paint to print: artist and novelist Rebecca Hunt
Where do new writers grow best? There is, as publishers and agents may soon discover, a fresh answer to the literary gardener's perennial query about the cultivation of talent. Over the past three decades, green-fingered recruiters from the smarter estates of the book trade have tended to inspect the seedbeds at UEA in Norwich and other esteemed schools of creative writing.
Ever since, in the early 1970s, the young Ian McEwan joined his mentor Malcolm Bradbury on a course that scarcely existed officially, that particular programme – and a handful of others – have yielded bloom after bloom for the quality side of the fiction business. Now sturdy rival degrees at Lancaster (the British pioneer), Bath, Manchester (at two separate universities) and Glasgow - with Royal Holloway or Birkbeck among the London University colleges - vie with UEA as preferred supplier of next-generation pioneers and prize-winners.
These programmes, and some others, should survive. Yet the coming hike in student fees will thrust weaker courses into jeopardy as the cost of tuition spikes and frugal publishers offer fewer, and less glittering, prizes to hopeful graduates. But should talent-hunters look beyond the usual circuit altogether to find tomorrow's stars?
Rebecca Hunt, fictional debutante of the season for her rule-flouting fantasia of Churchill's "black dog" depression, Mr Chartwell, emerged not from any creative-writing scheme but a painting degree at Central St Martin's school of art. As did Richard Milward, the fizzily inventive author of Apples and Ten Storeys Down. As for Man Booker finalist Tom McCarthy, although he studied English at Oxford, his fiction – from the fiercely "conceptual" Remainder onwards – bears the deep impress of a post-YBA, theory-friendly, art-school sensibility. You may detect the same mischief and audacity when it comes to story and form in the books of (say) Geoff Dyer, another writer steeped in ideas from the contemporary visual arts.
Read Boyd Tonkin's full piece at The Independent.
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