'A wonderfully flexible form'

 

“The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.  You learn a lot, writing fiction.” –  Penelope Lively

 

Born in Egypt on this date in 1933, the gregarious Lively has been an active, award-winning writer for nearly 60 years.  Author of both adult and children’s literature, she earned a Booker Prize for her adult novel Moon Tiger, and the Carnegie Medal for British Children's Boks for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe.   

 

Honored as a Fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature, Lively has written in several genres, doing novels, short stories – her most recent collection titled Metamorphosis – and radio and television scripts, reviews, and articles for newspapers and journals.  She’s also penned two memoirs:  Dancing Fish and Ammonites and Life in the Garden. 

 

While she didn’t start writing until her late 30s, she has been extremely prolific since, generating dozens of books in her main genres.  “Every novel generates its own climate,” she said.  “You just have to get going with it.”

 

And she advocates for being a good reader.  “All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me,” she said. “If I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself.”