Audio Interview with James Meek by Nigel Beale:We Are Now Beginning Our Descent
James Meek was born in London in 1962 and grew up in Dundee, Scotland. His award winning work as a journalist includes reports on Guantánamo Bay and on/from Iraq. He continues to contribute to The Guardian, the London Review of Books and Granta. He lived in Russia and Ukraine from 1991-99 and now lives in London. He has published two books of short stories: Last Orders (1992); and The Museum of Doubt (2000). His novels are: Drivetime (1995); McFarlane Boils the Sea (1989); and The People’s Act of Love (2005), set in Siberia during the Russian Revolution, which won the 2006 Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award, and the 2006 Ondaatje Prize.
We met at the Blue Met International Literary Festival in Montreal recently to discuss his fourth novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent. Talk centers on love stories, the power of words, their frailty when it comes to male female relations, mis-imagining, crystallization, false separation, lack of global distance, bombing parliament buildings and reading into character names. Meek’s heart, he informs us, has many lines on it.
Copyright © 2008 by Nigel Beale
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