What is the first news event you can recall?
Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon in 1969. I was five and we didn’t have a television at home, so I was taken to a crowded university room full of awed adults, and watched a blurry white figure step out onto a blurry white surface.
What is your most embarrassing moment at a book signing?
Oh, absolutely traditional. Being set up to sign at a table next to Terry Pratchett, where my queue of two people could be compared directly to his immense block-circling, probably planet-girdling, line.
If you could spend a day in one city or place at one moment in history, what would that be?
London in 1850, please. The city of dreadful night, stinking, dangerous, continually being melted and remade by technology and money—but the place to run into the young George Eliot and have a talkative lunch with her in a chophouse. On the way home I’ll park the Tardis outside the parsonage in Haworth just long enough to post four courses of penicillin through the letterbox.
What is your favourite quotation?
“The best is the enemy of the good.” (Voltaire, though he was probably quoting someone else.)
If you were given £1m to spend on other people, what would you spend it on and why?
Half on obvious quick-fix justice stuff, like primary education for girls in Africa. The other half to endow a juried prize for literary fantasy, to be called the Mirrlees Medal in honour of the great Hope Mirrlees, author of Lud-in-the-Mist, the winner to be awarded a pile of cash and an Art Nouveau medal inscribed with the words FEET FIRMLY PLANTED IN THE AIR. Why yes, I have previously given this some thought.
What do you most regret?
My actual answer to this question is between me and the people involved in my regrets, or possibly between me and God. But a true-enough replacement answer would be: that I was too timid to start writing novels till I was in my fifties.
What would people be surprised to know about you?
The thought of having to dance in public brings me out in a genuine, phobic cold sweat.
What have you changed your mind about?
The viability of anarchism. Smoking in cinemas being the coolest thing ever. The existence of God. Same-sex marriage.
What’s the perfect book to read in a crisis?
Depends on the crisis. For despair or imminent danger, the Book of Psalms. For times when human affairs seem to be sliding into chaos and corruption, a work of small-scale goodness like Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. For the times when you need to forget there even is a crisis, something perfectly frivolous or frivolously perfect, like Eva Ibbotson’s romance The Morning Gift.
Can you teach someone to be a writer?
It’s not a binary on/off, you-are-or-you-aren’t, kind of state. You can certainly teach almost everybody to be a better writer. But as well as the impartable stuff, there’s the inward disposition you need, which has at least as much to do with stubbornness as with talent. Writing means persisting at doing something the world really isn’t demanding from you.
Francis Spufford's novel Light Perpetual (Faber) has been longlisted for the Booker Prize
