Short introduction to the author`slife and style.

1. BIOGRAPHY
Novelist Graham Swift was born in London in 1949. He was educated at Dulwich College, Queens' College,
Cambridge, and York University. He was nominated as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Novelists' in the Book
Marketing Council's promotion in 1983.
He is the author of eight novels. The first, The Sweet Shop Owner (1980), is narrated by disillusioned shopkeeper
Willy Chapman, and unfolds over the course of a single day in June. The narrator of his second novel, Shuttlecock
(1981), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, becomes obsessed with his father's experiences during the
Second World War.
Waterland, his acclaimed third novel, was published in 1983. Narrated by history teacher Tom Crick, it describes
his youth spent in the Norfolk fens during the Second World War. These personal memories are woven into a
greater history of the area, slowly revealing the seeds of a family legacy that threatens his marriage. The book won
the GuardianFiction Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. It was followed by Out of this World(1988), the
story of a photojournalist and his estranged daughter, and Ever After (1992), in which a university professor
makes a traumatic discovery about his career.
Swift's sixth novel, Last Orders (1996), which won the Booker Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial
Prize (for fiction), recounts a journey begun in a pub in London's East End by four friends intent on fulfilling a
promise to scatter the ashes of their dead drinking-partner in the sea. A film adaptation of the novel starring
Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins was first screened in 2001. His novel, The Light of Day (2003), is the story of a
murder, a love affair and a disgraced former policeman turned private detective. Tomorrow (2007), explores
complex themes of parenthood, coupledom and identity via the personal thoughts and memories of the
protagonist, Paula, as she lies awake one night in bed.
His first non-fiction book is Making an Elephant: Writing from Within (2009).
Graham Swift is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in London.
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GENRES (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER)
Fiction, Short stories
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Sweet Shop Owner Allen Lane, 1980

2. Shuttlecock Allen Lane, 1981
Learning to Swim and Other Stories London Magazine Editions, 1982
Waterland Heinemann, 1983
The Magic Wheel: An Anthology of Fishing in Literature (co-editor with David Profumo) Picador /
Heinemann, 1985
Out of this World Viking, 1988
Ever After Picador, 1992
Last Orders Picador, 1996
The Light of Day Hamish Hamilton, 2003
Tomorrow Picador, 2007
Making an Elephant: Writing from Within Picador, 2009
BUY BOOKS BY GRAHAM SWIFT AT AMAZON.CO.UK
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PRIZES AND AWARDS
1981 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize Shuttlecock
1983 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) Waterland
1983 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize Waterland
1983 Guardian Fiction Prize Waterland
1983 Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy) Waterland
1983 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize Waterland
1992 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (France) Ever After
1996 Booker Prize for Fiction Last Orders
1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) (joint winner) Last Orders
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CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE
When Graham Swift was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction for his sixth novel Last Orders in 1996, it was seen
by many critics and readers as long overdue acknowledgement of his status as a contemporary novelist. Graham
Swift's novels are all ambitious in their own ways in their thematic and narrative scope. Swift tackles ideas of
narrative, history, conflicts between the generations, the place of an individual in the larger scale of events. His
novels are frequently organised around an underlying mystery, and his oblique and non-linear narrative technique
lends itself to a gradual revelation of events in a manner reminiscent at times of the nineteenth century detective
novel.

3. Swift revels in complex narrative strategies; his characters debate, and their accounts reflect, a rejection of the
chronologically linear view of narrative. Swift questions the nature of narrative through questioning the reality of
history, a theme that is central toShuttlecock (1981), Waterland (1983), Out of This World (1988), and Ever
After (1992). In all these novels Swift considers the nature of the relationship between personal and public
histories, between self-created and orderly narratives and the disorderly nature of actuality. In Shuttlecock the
protagonist Prentis struggles to identify how much reality there is in his father's self-declared World War II
heroism. In a similar fashion in Ever After the central character, Bill Unwin, becomes aware that his own vision is
colouring his allegedly factual reconstruction of the life of his great-great grandfather from his ancestor's
nineteenth-century notebooks. In Waterland Crick the history teacher interlaces an account of the seminal events
of his own life with an account of events and personalities from the Industrial Revolution to the present. Crick
interweaves the personal, the regional and the national, and sets all these against the historical perspective of the
natural world and the landscape of the Fens. In Out of This Worlddifferent generations look back from differing
stances on the professional activities of their parents in wartime situations, creating narratives which are mediated
through memory and personal resentments so that they have no objective existence.
History as narrative is for Swift primarily a personal rather than a factual reality, a fact reflected in his use of a
predominantly first person narration in what is almost a stream of consciousness manner. Story telling is central
to Waterland, as Crick debates the very nature of history and the relationship between past and present. The novel
is essentially a dramatic monologue, the history teacher in the classroom recounting his own life story as well as
that of his ancestors. Swift's narrators generally interact to a minimal degree with their addressees, although the
awareness of their presence can create a distinctive tone of voice. The schoolboys of Waterland are addressed
directly, if not always aloud, as 'children', and the fact that Crick's tale is full of adult horrors (suicide, murder and
abortion) makes the contrast between his narrative mode and the tale he tells all the more unsettling.
Both Shuttlecock and Ever After (1992) play with the idea of the narrative within the
narrative. Shuttlecock contains the memoirs of the apparently heroic father and his World War II exploits. The
narrator in Ever After finds himself in possession of his great-great grandfather's nineteenth century letters, and
temporal boundaries are further blurred by the way in which the narrator within the narration becomes a presence
in the novel's present tense.
Narrative in Last Orders is carried by an even greater multiplicity of voices. The four central characters of the novel
come together to carry out the last wish of their recently deceased friend by scattering his ashes from the end of
Margate Pier. Their day is presented in an interwoven series of first person narratives, shifting between times and
tenses, as memories of and revelations about the dead man are woven into the recriminations and irritations of
their immediate situation. The blackly farcical events of a day in which four men come together in a procession
towards the final resting-place of their friend is unmistakably reminiscent of the Hades episode in Joyce's Ulysses;
Swift creates something of the same sense of unease, coloured with the same grim humour.
The significance of history and the presence and influence of earlier narratives is evident in the way in which Swift

4. himself makes use of previous literary traditions in his work.Last Orders alludes not only to Ulysses but also to
Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Waterland, set in the East Anglican Fens, conjures up the similar landscape of Great
Expectations, and in its epigraph explicitly draws on Dickens to reinforce the powerful presence of the flat
marshland. Also in the background of the novel is George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, with its lock setting and
emphasis on the place and power of water in man's working life.Ever After, with its account of a recovered
nineteenth-century manuscript, and the depiction of the rivalries and intrigue of the academic world, presents a
dark and conspiratorial world reminiscent of Henry James's The Aspern Papers.
Swift's emphasis on personal history and the subjective nature of memory leads him to raise questions about the
differing perspectives of the generations. In Shuttlecock three generations of the Prentis family meditate actively
on their interactions, while in the fourth generation the central protagonist's sons are a passive and silently critical
presence. Women are often peripheral in Swift's novels to the interaction between the men. In Last Orders the
dead man's wife is present chiefly as adjunct to and cause of the competition and secrecy among the four men.
Relations between fathers and sons in particular form a recurrent strand in Swift's novels; the way in which macho
posturing, whether over wars, careers or women, is crucial in creating these relationships forms a central strand
of Shuttlecock, Out of this World and Last Orders.
Graham Swift's novels deal with the extraordinary in the ordinary. In their settings, language and characterisations
Swift's novels are sparse and consciously drab. His protagonists are often ordinary men, middle-aged clerks or
teachers or accountants. In their voices Swift ponders some of the bigger issues of life - death, birth, marriage and
sex - as well as the everyday politics of relationships and friendships. His intricate narrative patterns raise
questions about the relationship between personal histories and world events, between personal and public
perceptions. He highlights the impossibility of creating a single objective reality, fictional or otherwise, and through
fiction investigates the very nature of fiction.
Cora Lindsay, 2002
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AUTHOR STATEMENT
'I believe it would be a bad day for a writer if he could say, "I know exactly what I'm doing", and I am wary of
making statements about my work. If I have any abiding allegiance in my writing it is to the power of the
imagination, and I hope my imagination will always surprise and stretch me and take me along unsuspected paths,
just as I hope it will continue to bring me up against certain things which I will have to recognise as my own
peculiar territory - though that too is a process of discovery, not of preconception.
I have no wariness about the potential of fiction as such, or the privilege and joy (despite many an agony!) of
writing it. Where else can you have such licence of expression? Where else can you combine so richly and

5. intimately the world of ideas with the world of concrete reality? And where else can you know - or at least hope -
that for each individual reader, each act of collaboration between author and reader, the experience will be
something different? I have enormous faith in that invisible collaborative experience, though when I write I never
think of the reader. Fiction seems to me only to do in a specialised, concentrated way what we all need to do: to
enter, in our minds, experiences other than our own. That is no small or simple thing - all our moral and social
pretensions rest upon it. So I have no wariness about fiction's importance either.'
CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE
When Graham Swift was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction for his sixth novel Last Orders in 1996, it was seen
by many critics and readers as long overdue acknowledgement of his status as a contemporary novelist. Graham
Swift's novels are all ambitious in their own ways in their thematic and narrative scope. Swift tackles ideas of
narrative, history, conflicts between the generations, the place of an individual in the larger scale of events. His
novels are frequently organised around an underlying mystery, and his oblique and non-linear narrative technique
lends itself to a gradual revelation of events in a manner reminiscent at times of the nineteenth century detective
novel.
Swift revels in complex narrative strategies; his characters debate, and their accounts reflect, a rejection of the
chronologically linear view of narrative. Swift questions the nature of narrative through questioning the reality of
history, a theme that is central toShuttlecock (1981), Waterland (1983), Out of This World (1988), and Ever
After (1992). In all these novels Swift considers the nature of the relationship between personal and public
histories, between self-created and orderly narratives and the disorderly nature of actuality. In Shuttlecock the
protagonist Prentis struggles to identify how much reality there is in his father's self-declared World War II
heroism. In a similar fashion in Ever After the central character, Bill Unwin, becomes aware that his own vision is
colouring his allegedly factual reconstruction of the life of his great-great grandfather from his ancestor's
nineteenth-century notebooks. In Waterland Crick the history teacher interlaces an account of the seminal events
of his own life with an account of events and personalities from the Industrial Revolution to the present. Crick
interweaves the personal, the regional and the national, and sets all these against the historical perspective of the
natural world and the landscape of the Fens. In Out of This Worlddifferent generations look back from differing
stances on the professional activities of their parents in wartime situations, creating narratives which are mediated
through memory and personal resentments so that they have no objective existence.
History as narrative is for Swift primarily a personal rather than a factual reality, a fact reflected in his use of a
predominantly first person narration in what is almost a stream of consciousness manner. Story telling is central

6. to Waterland, as Crick debates the very nature of history and the relationship between past and present. The novel
is essentially a dramatic monologue, the history teacher in the classroom recounting his own life story as well as
that of his ancestors. Swift's narrators generally interact to a minimal degree with their addressees, although the
awareness of their presence can create a distinctive tone of voice. The schoolboys of Waterland are addressed
directly, if not always aloud, as 'children', and the fact that Crick's tale is full of adult horrors (suicide, murder and
abortion) makes the contrast between his narrative mode and the tale he tells all the more unsettling.
Both Shuttlecock and Ever After (1992) play with the idea of the narrative within the
narrative. Shuttlecock contains the memoirs of the apparently heroic father and his World War II exploits. The
narrator in Ever After finds himself in possession of his great-great grandfather's nineteenth century letters, and
temporal boundaries are further blurred by the way in which the narrator within the narration becomes a presence
in the novel's present tense.
Narrative in Last Orders is carried by an even greater multiplicity of voices. The four central characters of the novel
come together to carry out the last wish of their recently deceased friend by scattering his ashes from the end of
Margate Pier. Their day is presented in an interwoven series of first person narratives, shifting between times and
tenses, as memories of and revelations about the dead man are woven into the recriminations and irritations of
their immediate situation. The blackly farcical events of a day in which four men come together in a procession
towards the final resting-place of their friend is unmistakably reminiscent of the Hades episode in Joyce's Ulysses;
Swift creates something of the same sense of unease, coloured with the same grim humour.
The significance of history and the presence and influence of earlier narratives is evident in the way in which Swift
himself makes use of previous literary traditions in his work.Last Orders alludes not only to Ulysses but also to
Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Waterland, set in the East Anglican Fens, conjures up the similar landscape of Great
Expectations, and in its epigraph explicitly draws on Dickens to reinforce the powerful presence of the flat
marshland. Also in the background of the novel is George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, with its lock setting and
emphasis on the place and power of water in man's working life.Ever After, with its account of a recovered
nineteenth-century manuscript, and the depiction of the rivalries and intrigue of the academic world, presents a
dark and conspiratorial world reminiscent of Henry James's The Aspern Papers.
Swift's emphasis on personal history and the subjective nature of memory leads him to raise questions about the
differing perspectives of the generations. In Shuttlecock three generations of the Prentis family meditate actively
on their interactions, while in the fourth generation the central protagonist's sons are a passive and silently critical
presence. Women are often peripheral in Swift's novels to the interaction between the men. In Last Orders the
dead man's wife is present chiefly as adjunct to and cause of the competition and secrecy among the four men.
Relations between fathers and sons in particular form a recurrent strand in Swift's novels; the way in which macho
posturing, whether over wars, careers or women, is crucial in creating these relationships forms a central strand
of Shuttlecock, Out of this World and Last Orders.

7. Graham Swift's novels deal with the extraordinary in the ordinary. In their settings, language and characterisations
Swift's novels are sparse and consciously drab. His protagonists are often ordinary men, middle-aged clerks or
teachers or accountants. In their voices Swift ponders some of the bigger issues of life - death, birth, marriage and
sex - as well as the everyday politics of relationships and friendships. His intricate narrative patterns raise
questions about the relationship between personal histories and world events, between personal and public
perceptions. He highlights the impossibility of creating a single objective reality, fictional or otherwise, and through
fiction investigates the very nature of fiction.
Cora Lindsay, 2002
Top of page
AUTHOR STATEMENT
'I believe it would be a bad day for a writer if he could say, "I know exactly what I'm doing", and I am wary of
making statements about my work. If I have any abiding allegiance in my writing it is to the power of the
imagination, and I hope my imagination will always surprise and stretch me and take me along unsuspected paths,
just as I hope it will continue to bring me up against certain things which I will have to recognise as my own
peculiar territory - though that too is a process of discovery, not of preconception.
I have no wariness about the potential of fiction as such, or the privilege and joy (despite many an agony!) of
writing it. Where else can you have such licence of expression? Where else can you combine so richly and
intimately the world of ideas with the world of concrete reality? And where else can you know - or at least hope -
that for each individual reader, each act of collaboration between author and reader, the experience will be
something different? I have enormous faith in that invisible collaborative experience, though when I write I never
think of the reader. Fiction seems to me only to do in a specialised, concentrated way what we all need to do: to
enter, in our minds, experiences other than our own. That is no small or simple thing - all our moral and social
pretensions rest upon it. So I have no wariness about fiction's importance either.'
Source: British Source