Scottish writer A.L. Kennedy talks attention

Dion Frost

27 August 2008

Kennedy asserts the PR she has received since winning the 25,000 pound Costa Book of the Year award early on in the year is "nibbling away at her like mice". Instead of giving perpetual interviews, the Scottish writer and stand-up comic would wish to be completing her last collection of short stories, researching her new novel and inclining to half-finished screenplays. But Kennedy, 42, told Reuters she found time to draft during train journeys and in hostel rooms, as she travels round the country to communicate at press events, read extracts at literary holidays, and perform stand-up comedy. Q : What impressed you to pen your last novel "Day", about a previous World War II Royal Air Force gunner? A : Partly because I am in a place at war which had a selected set of values that it was fighting for in the 2nd world war which it is saying it does supports.

We think about ourselves of still having particular values - but the campaigns that we are undertaking now are tons more morally ambivalent and complex.

Q : What is trickier, to draft short stories or a novel? A : With the short story you do not have that long run-up and you do not have a massive period of time to be with the personalities and with the reader, whilst with a novel you are carrying out plenty of work and you do have plenty of threads and things to juggle, but it does become sort of self-sustaining.