Morning reading: Booker shortlist inspiration

Adam can’t decide whether he should be inspired or jealous of other writers’ inspiration.

The Guardian asked the six authors shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize about what inspired their books. Here are excerpts from two of the interesting responses.

Patricia Lockwood on No One is Talking About This:

The idea often comes on a heightened day, when you’ve had too much of something or too little of something else, or when everything is about to be completely different. On the day I started No One Is Talking About This we were moving apartments, and I was hiding from my husband in the bedroom so I didn’t have to help – or, as he more charitably put it, so I didn’t walk directly into the movers just as they were lifting my Glass Menagerie out the door.

I sat on the floor and began to read Mrs Caliban, the 1982 masterpiece by Rachel Ingalls. […] I just felt the heightened moment, and for some inexplicable reason took a picture with my phone of the shadows that the vines were making on the wall, in my now empty bedroom, where I sat alone, not helping. I probably looked at the picture and considered whether I should post it.

Damon Galgut on The Promise, a family saga from South Africa:

On a more conscious level, the idea for the book came to me one semi-drunken afternoon, listening to a friend describe the funerals of his parents, brother and sister. Unlikely though it sounds, he turned tragedy into comedy, by focusing on the antics of the living. At least one of his anecdotes – about a hysterical relative forcing the undertaker to open the coffin, to check the right corpse was inside – found its way into the novel. Dark stuff, to be sure; but not without its funny, human fringe.