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Channel: Mark Haddon | The Guardian

Vote to save the NHS

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The National Health Action party is drawing attention to the most important issue of the day – the government's plans to destroy the NHS

During the late 80s I worked as an illustrator for Nursing Times. When Margaret Thatcher's government split the NHS into self-governing trusts and created an internal market for services, I began a regular cartoon called "St Opt-Outs", an everyday story of medical folk struggling under the cosh of managers helicoptered in from the private sector. Adverts for life insurance printed on nurse's uniforms. Hot meals bussed in from Bulgaria. Anaesthetic stopping, mid-operation, when a patient's credit card maxed out.

Year by year it seemed less and less preposterous, because those changes were only the beginning of a relentless process, continued by every subsequent government, that led to the Health and Social Care Act of March last year.

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Mark Haddon on The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Guardian book club

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Making my novel into a play seemed a preposterous idea: in the end it reminded me of the reasons I wrote it in the first place

I would have found it difficult writing this a year ago. I'd talked about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time so much since its publication that most of my memories of writing the novel had been over-written by my memories of talking about writing the novel. I could see how it might affect a reader, but I'd lost the ability to experience those feelings directly. Whenever anyone asked me about the novel my answers felt less and less reliable and I felt less and less comfortable giving them.

Over the years my agent, my publisher and I had regular inquiries about theatrical rights to the novel. It seemed impossible to me that such a radically first-person novel set entirely in the head of a single character could be translated into a radically third-person medium without doing it irreparable damage, but we were worn slowly down by the sheer volume of requests. Gradually we moved from thinking a stage version was a preposterous idea, to wondering if it might be possible, to being intrigued as to how someone might be able to do it. So, instead of waiting to be asked by the right person, we decided to ask the right person. I knew that playwright Simon Stephens would be a joy to work with; I loved his writing and I was fairly confident that his bleak nihilism and fascination with random violence would steer him round the obvious pitfall of sentimentality.

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Elliott Carter: music of storms and stillness

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The American composer Elliott Carter died last year aged 103. As the Aldeburgh festival prepares to stage a posthumous premiere of new work, Mark Haddon celebrates his 'inhuman', beautiful music

Writing about music is like writing about wine. A million words about tobacco notes or the slate slopes of the Mosel will miss the point that human beings have been drinking it for 7,000 years to get drunk, that rationality, perception, propriety, insight, libido, our whole relationship with reality is hostage to a simple chemical produced when fruit rots. The Greeks knew better. Dionysos was the god of ecstasy, not the god of fine dining.

And a million words about equal temperament or Klemperer's Fidelio will similarly miss the point, that human beings have been making and listening to music for 50,000 years because it releases us from the tyranny of those same words, because it is a universal language that everyone can understand and no one can translate, because it moves us in profound and contradictory ways, because it is both pregnant with meaning and utterly meaningless.

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Mark Haddon: what the National Theatre means to me

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Working with the National Theatre has been the most extraordinary experience

Author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which was adapted for the stage by Simon Stephens and produced at the National last year, before transferring to the West End.

I feel oddly at home at the National. The first play I saw there was probably Tony Harrison's The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus in 1990 – it certainly left a vivid impression on me. At one point, I was very briefly on attachment at the National Theatre studio, which sadly came to nothing, but I met Simon Stephens there and we bonded in a coffee shop around the corner. When we finally sat down to consider requests for the stage rights for Curious Incident, I chose Simon to adapt it and he knew the team he wanted to work with: it had to be at the National, with [director] Marianne Elliott and [physical theatre group] Frantic Assembly.

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Writers and critics on the best books of 2013

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Hilary Mantel, Jonathan Franzen, Mohsin Hamid, Ruth Rendell, Tom Stoppard, Malcolm Gladwell, Eleanor Catton and many more recommend the books that impressed them this year

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw (Fourth Estate) is a brilliant, sprawling, layered and unsentimental portrayal of contemporary China. It made me think and laugh. I also love Dave Eggers' The Circle (Hamish Hamilton), which is a sharp-eyed and funny satire about the obsession with "sharing" our lives through technology. It's convincing and a little creepy.

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Mark Haddon's Ethiopian adventure

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The curious incident of the novelist who conquered his fear of flying with the help of Valium, Mogwai and Ethiopian Airlines flight 707 to Addis Ababa

I have been terrified of flying for at least 20 years. I try very hard not to fly, but when I'm forced to I feel sick and frightened and angry for several weeks beforehand. I spend my time abroad thinking constantly about the inevitably fatal return journey and when I get home I suffer a mild form of PTSD in which I find even the sight of an aircraft upsetting. In the past few years my wife and our two boys have started to go on holiday without me. I console myself that I have a very modest carbon footprint, but I dream of visiting Iceland or the Canadian Rockies and increasingly I'm haunted by the idea that I'm going to find myself lying on my deathbed knowing that I've spent one life on one planet and that my cowardice has made it so much smaller.

Some years ago Oxfam asked me if I wanted to visit one of the projects they helped fund then write about it, so I travelled by bus to the Migrants Resource Centre in Victoria, London SW1 and despite meeting some extraordinary people there has always been a small part of me which believes I never quite stepped up to the plate. So I went back to Oxfam last year and asked if I could do it again, but this time visit one of the projects they helped fund overseas. It would be like sealing myself into a barrel several miles upstream of Niagara Falls. Once I'd agreed to go there would be no escape. I would fly further than I'd ever flown before, I could go on holiday with my family again and, hopefully, at some future date, die a happier death.

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The ban on books for prisoners is over. But how did it happen in the first place? | Mark Haddon

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Whether the Ministry of Justice decision was driven by dogma or a simple mistake, such inhumane treatment would do nothing to rehabilitate prisoners

The ban on sending books to prisoners in England and Wales was finally declared unlawful by Mr Justice Collins in the high court on Friday. It is good news for prisoners, good news for their families and friends, and good news for Frances Crook and the Howard League for Penal Reform who kick-started the campaign to get the ridiculous ruling overturned. And it is probably good news for many inside the Ministry of Justice who, I suspect, are heartily tired of defending the indefensible and secretly glad to be able to blame the high court for the U-turn they should have performed a long time ago.

It is still instructive, though, to ask how the ban came into being in the first place. We know it was a mistake – and we know they know it was a mistake – because it was introduced by Chris Grayling last November as part of a new “incentives and earned privileges” regime. That is, prisoners could get hold of new books, but only by buying them, and only when they had earned the right to do so. Soon after the rule came under fire, however, he and his department began to claim it was a policy aimed at stemming the flow of drugs into prison (an assertion rapidly dismissed by the Prisoner Officers Association). So, right from the start, the Ministry of Justice knew its original justification was preposterous.

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How a feminist anthology taught me that outsiders can pull together | Mark Haddon

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I grew up on a diet of Carry On films, Benny Hill and my parents’ Daily Telegraph. The Spare Rib Reader helped me articulate an unease that I had felt for as long as I could remember

To be honest, I can’t remember a single thing about the contents of this book. Mind you, that’s true of many books I’ve read. I do know that I borrowed it from my girlfriend Sally when we were students at Oxford in the early 1980s, along with Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.

What I do remember is that the Spare Rib Reader felt very different from those other books. It had a slightly scruffy, home-made feel about it, more real, more down to earth. All three books grew out of the women’s movement, obviously, but the Reader felt like a team effort – not just a woman’s voice but the voices of many women, the voice of the movement itself, a record of something important happening out there in the world.

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Mark Haddon: a celebration of Allan Ahlberg

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Quentin Blake, Roddy Doyle and Chris Riddell were among writers and illustrators who creatively saluted the venerable children’s author Ahlberg

In 2014 Allan Ahlberg was lined up to receive the inaugural Booktrust lifetime achievement award. Allan, however, felt uneasy about Amazon sponsoring it and politely declined. Which might have been the end of the story, except that Philip Pullman remarked to me – or perhaps it was I who remarked to him – that Allan very much deserved a lifetime achievement award and it would be a good idea if it came, not from the world of publishing, but from his peers. An award to celebrate not just Ahlberg’s own books, but those he wrote with his late wife, Janet, among which are some of the most well-loved children’s books of the last 40 years: The Jolly Postman, Burglar Bill, Peepo!, Each Peach Pear Plum

But what might the prize be? A cup? A certificate? A statuette? A medal? In the end we asked 150 children’s writers and illustrators to send us a letter, a poem or a drawing to show how much Allan and Janet’s work meant to them. We would then bind them into a single book.

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Mark Haddon: 'I’ve read too many beige short stories in my life'

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The author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime explains how, in order to find his voice as a short story writer, he had to escape the legacy of Chekhov and Carver

I’d been trying to write short stories for a long time, failing, throwing them away, trying again, failing, throwing them away. I was driven by sheer bloody-mindedness more than anything else. After all, short stories are just strings of well-chosen words. I’d written a novel, I’d written for radio and TV, I’d written books for children. How hard could it be to tell a satisfying story in a few thousand words? The puzzle infuriated me.

I’d started to wonder if the prevailing wisdom was correct, that there is a profound, near-mystical difference between novels and short stories, that the latter is a form that demands more skill and involves higher risks and whose success depends on giving readers something far more intangible and refined than the joy of reading well-constructed prose, the seductive pull of imaginary lives and the desire to know what is going to happen next.

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Mark Haddon: 'I'm not a terribly good writer, but I'm a persistent editor'

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The author on self-doubt, Scandi crime and throwing away three quarters of what he produces

Some days I can’t write. Some weeks I can’t write. It wouldn’t be such a problem if I could identify those days and weeks in advance. I’d cut my losses and go on a long run up the Thames. I’d get in a box set of Scandi crime or take the train to London for a gallery crawl. I’d paint or draw. But the realisation dawns only around lunchtime after I’ve been staring at a blank screen for hours, or filling it with laboured, unconvincing prose that will need to be deleted later.

The problem, I think, is that I’m not a terribly good writer. I am, however, a very persistent and bloody-minded editor (who, providentially, happens to be married to an even better editor). I’m also ruthless about culling anything that isn’t working. I throw away at least three quarters of what I write, then I draft and redraft what remains until hopefully, somewhere between versions 15 and 25, something happens. That frisson you get when you read your words back and they seem to have been written by someone – or something – that is not quite you. A rightness like a heavy oak door clicking softly home on to its latch.

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Best holiday reads 2017, picked by writers – part two

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What to pack along with the aftersun and flipflops? From novels about gay footballers and updated Greek classics to biographies and poetry, our guest critics offer their holiday must-reads

Part one: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Julian Barnes and more pick their summer reads

Colm Tóibín’s exhilarating House of Names (Viking £14.99) is a retelling of Aeschylus’s drama on the sacrificing by Agamemnon of his daughter Cassandra and its tragic consequences, including the murder of Agamemnon by his wife, Clytemnestra. The book has a controlled, hushed quality, like that of a Morandi still life, which only serves to heighten the terror and pity of the tale. Michael Longley’s latest collection, Angel Hill (Jonathan Cape £10) – what a genius he has for titles – is at once lush and elegiac, delicate and muscular, melancholy and thrilling. I shall not be going anywhere – hate holidays – but will stay happily at home, rereading Evelyn Waugh’s second world war Sword of Honour trilogy (Penguin £14.99). Pure bliss.

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'I had a ghost touch me – horrible!' Writers visit haunted houses

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To celebrate Halloween, Sarah Perry, Jeanette Winterson, Mark Haddon and other writers put a new spin on the traditional ghost story with tales set in English Heritage properties

In my adolescence, there was no historical figure that I was more intrigued by than Elizabeth I. Her love-affair with the Earl of Leicester was a particular area of interest. So when English Heritage offered up a list of potential sites for a ghost story, which included Kenilworth castle, where Leicester unsuccessfully proposed to Elizabeth, the adolescent in me immediately said “yes”. But the imagination works in strange ways. Once I was at Kenilworth it wasn’t the story of Elizabeth and Leicester that I found myself thinking about – neither the proposal nor the death of Leicester’s wife as told in Walter Scott’s historically inaccurate novel Kenilworth.

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I’m going to keep giving to Oxfam, and so should you | Mark Haddon

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I have seen the vital work the charity does around the world and I admire its willingness to examine its practices and change

If there is one clear thing we have learned from the revelations about the behaviour of certain Oxfam staff in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and in Chad in 2006, it is how much our standards and expectations have changed over the intervening years. The idea of a sex scandal has largely been stripped of the titillating ring it once had. The story has mostly centred on the abuse of women by men who had power over them. Prostitution has been treated as an unquestionable wrong, and it is now widely accepted that being paid for sex is something women can find themselves forced into, not just by the men who are paying but also by their economic and social vulnerability.

Cast your mind back: 2011 was the year in which the BBC shelved a Newsnight documentary about the Jimmy Savile scandal. It would be a further 11 months before ITV’s Exposure: the Other Side of Jimmy Savile lifted the lid on what had been an open secret for a long time. Operation Yewtree would not get under way until 2012. Gary Glitter, Rolf Harris, Stuart Hall and Max Clifford had not yet been charged in the UK with child sex abuse.

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Mark Haddon on the magic of audiobooks: 'I haven’t read a book properly until I’ve had it read to me'

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Forget the snobs who treat the written word as superior. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime author explains why he’s a huge fan

A confession. Until this year I’d never properly listened to the audiobook versions of my novels. I’d dipped in and out, but I’d never immersed myself completely. It’s not that the readers’ voices fail to match the voice in my head. It’s that the voice in my head is not really a voice at all. I think of it as a voice. It sounds like a voice. Then I stand up in public to read a passage I have scanned a hundred times during the writing of the book and realise that I don’t know how to pronounce Y Mynyddoedd Duon or holoprosencephaly (I stumbled over both while reading a section of The Red House at the Hay festival). How can any human actor recreate the flattering self-delusion and selective deafness of the text heard by your inner ear?

This year is the first time I’ve listened to the audio version of one of my books in its entirety, because Tim McInnerny reads The Porpoise so well that it has become the voice in which I now read the novel to myself. Like all really good actors he understands how little acting is needed. His gentle, self-deprecating bass never upstages the text. His voice is the place where the story happens and after a while we are aware of the story and nothing else. Does he know precisely how to pronounce the 14th-century English of the quotations from John Gower or is it just serene self-confidence? I neither know nor care.

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Social Distance: a graphic short story for the coronavirus age by Mark Haddon

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In this touching story for the Guardian, the author depicts a solitary man finding isolation no different from normal life – until he has an unexpected encounter at the Co-op

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Mark Haddon: 'The only books I wish I’d written are better versions of my own'

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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time author on discovering Germaine Greer, his dislike of Stieg Larsson and the comforts of reading The Wind in the Willows

The book I am currently reading
Homie by Danez Smith, Rusty Brown by Chris Ware and Ice by Anna Kavan, to name only the top three on the pile.

The book that changed my life
The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski. Technically, it’s the book of a TV series about the role of science in the development of human society. I was 11 when I first saw it, and I can still feel the thrill of watching a great door swing open on to a world of ideas.

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Overcoming fears, discovering nature ... what I have learned from lockdown

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As lockdown eases, authors including Anne Enright, Mark Haddon and Sebastian Barry reflect on what they have learned – and what comes next

I remember being at an airport gate (back in the other life and somewhere far away), watching a toddler run around like a charming lunatic, stealing the hearts of one waiting passenger after another, while being pursued by a pair of exhausted parents. I knew, even before I heard the accent, that this child was Irish. She was not a silent French toddler, not a Finnish child doing her homework while on the road. This was the kind of complete and cheerful non-compliance that Irish children call “having fun”. Of course it was the tension that made her bonkers; there is nothing like pushing your parents over the edge, in the queue for a 12-hour flight. 

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