Kennedy has the last laugh

The Times, Thursday, 24 January

With her long, unsmiling face, the novelist A L Kennedy is easy to distinguish from a ray of sunshine, but in public she performs with a witty self-confidence which rarely fails to surprise those who dismiss her as a miserablist.

Kennedy was at it again on Tuesday night as she collected the Costa Book of the Year for Day, her historical novel, which had already claimed the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year prize. In her acceptance speech she made a passionate plea for author’s rights to fair rewards, and against cost cutting retailers. This was, after all, the "most influential room that I could every play to".

It was to be expected. Whether she is reading from her books or delivering stand-up comedy, Kennedy’s fierce intelligence always demands attention.

She brought all of her intellect to bear in Day, a fiction based partially around the Forest of Dean and the Black Country, where her grandparents and parents once lived. More than five years in the making, whatever its strengths as a novel, Day is an impressive feat of historical research, which Kennedy undertook in part to understand how the world around her had been made.

The novel reveals the life of ‘Alfie’ Day, the former tail gunner of a Lancaster bomber, whose harrowing life is pieced together as the book unfolds: the brutal father, the put-upon, Methodist mother, the camaraderie of the bomber crews and their anxieties as they fly out towards death. As might be expected with Kennedy, there is no happy ending.

Joanna Trollope, the chair of the Costa judges, found Day comparable with the work of James Joyce and said the book was perfect and beautifully crafted. Yesterday, having broken a promotional tour in the United States to collect her award and despite her fear of flying, Kennedy jetted back across the Atlantic, where the New York Times has already compared “this gifted writer” to the Russian masters.

By now this author should be used to such accolades. Despite her evident dislike of awards – “prizes do not make sense” she writes on her website – she has been winning them throughout her professional career.

Alison Louise Kennedy was born in 1965, and brought up in Dundee. though notoriously cagey about her early years, her family’s religious background has plainly left a mark on her worldview, as did her parents’ divorce when she was 11.

After studying English and Drama at Warwick University, by 25 she was installed as writer in residence at Hamilton and East Kilbride social work department. Her first book, Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains is described by the British Council – renowned for talking-up home-grown artists in colourful language –as “a bleak collection of short stories set in Scotland”.

Since then she has created a succession of difficult and challenging novels and short stories, and On Bullfighting, a non-fiction work which reveals how she contemplated suicide after the death of her maternal grandfather.

It is a pedigree which apparently cuts across her emergence as a stand-up comedian, but Kennedy, more than most, appears to understand that comedy is the flipside of tragedy. She first appeared on stage in 2005, and afterwards enjoyed a sellout run on the Edinburgh Fringe. She still performs, regularly in Edinburgh and Glasgow, but on stages all over Britain.

“Anyone who likes her writing, would like her stand-up. It is the same dry style which she has in her writing which she brings to her routine. There are very well crafted jokes there, but it is not ‘ho ho ho’ type comedy,” said Tommy Sheppard, the owner of the Stand clubs.

Kennedy lives in a flat in Glasgow’s West End, a seemingly determined loner, plagued by a bad back. She doesn’t care much for journalists, but appears to delight in the question and answer features which fill up magazine pages. In one telling answer, she urged would-be writers to avoid using drugs or drink as stimulants.

“Sometimes your substance of choice will sucker you in with a little good foreplay (writing you would have produced anyway) but eventually you’ll end up on the rag heap with Dylan Thomas, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Brendan Behan and all the rest of the much more numerous drunks and junkies who didn’t even make it to visibility before they destroyed themselves.

“You do this by yourself, because you are made that way. Try faking it and it will f*** you and your ability to do what you were born to do. But feel free to try it the other way first, many people do. It's frightening to write - people who are frightened run to substances. That's normal - but we can't run from the fear. We need it.”

Kennedy still teaches creative writing, but advocates “just write” if you want to succeed as an author. Her own love of her craft and her endless pursuit of perfection suggest we have not seen the best of her yet.

Great Scottish authors? No they're English

The Times, December 22, 2007

With a few strokes of a bureaucrat’s pen, the entire Scottish literary tradition stretching from the medieval epic poetry of John Barbour to the drug-addled excesses of Irvine Welsh has been dismissed by the US Library of Congress and now appears as a subheading of another topic: English literature.

The decision to reclassify 700 years of Scottish writing as a subset of English has prompted the Scottish Government to raise the matter with the US Congress and sparked outrage among Scottish authors and academics.

The Washington-based institution is accused of “subjugating” a unique literary canon and classing Scots as an ethnic group within England. The poet Liz Lochhead described the American move as “appalling” while the crime writer Ian Rankin said the library’s dictat “made no kind of sense”. Even a spokesman for that most reserved of bodies, the National Library of Scotland, accused the Library of Congress of “a gross inaccuracy” and urged it to reconsider its decision.

Under the new rules – announced in the library’s Cataloging Services Bulletin - the heading “Scottish Literature”, and more than 40 Scottish subjects ranging from “Erotic poetry, Scottish” to “television plays, Scottish” are replaced just three headings: “English Literature – Scottish authors”, “Dialect Literature, Scottish” and the catch-all “Scotland - Literatures”.

The results are almost laughable. Readers searching for The Thirty-nine Steps by John Buchan and similar works of derring-do by Scottish writers will have to look for the books under the heading “Adventure Stories – English”, rather than “Adventure Stories – Scottish”, because that category has ceased to exist.

Similarly, differences between genres of Scottish poetry are wiped out. “Science Fiction, Scottish” becomes “Science Fiction, English”, while fans of crime writing seeking modern “Tartan Noir” authors will have to search in “Detective and Mystery Stories, English” .

But if the changes can seem absurd, they could have far reaching consequences. Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are routinely used around the world. Even local libraries which employ the familiar Dewey decimal system for organising collections refer to LCSH when accessing material by topic. Publishers and booksellers worldwide are heavily influenced by the classification, raising the prospect that modern Scottish literature and poetry will be subsumed under the heading “English”.

Some of these difficulties have already been raised by the National Library of Scotland, which has urged the Library of Congress to restore distinct subject headings for Scottish literature. A National Library spokesman said that “aside from the obvious objections on the grounds of national identity”, the American decision presented practical problems.

“We are now in the position of having to choose between adopting these changes, thereby adopting what we consider to be a gross inaccuracy to our catalogue records and risking the alienation of many our readers, or else we abandon this international standard and accept a substantial increase to our cataloguing workloads,” said the spokesman.

Linda Fabiani, the Culture Minister, said the decision was ultimately one for authorities in the USA. However, she added: “This government believes that Scottish Literature is quite distinctive from English Literature and should be recognised as such . I shall also be raising this issue directly with Congressmen early in the new year.”

The Library of Congress maintains that “English literature” does not refer to the literature of England, but to all the literature of the countries of the United Kingdom, and the Scottish, Irish, Welsh and Irish authors writing in English conform to “the customary scope of English literature as a discipline […including] works by authors such as Sir Walter Scott, Dylan Thomas and James Joyce.”

The wider Scottish literary community reacted to this position with a mixture of incredulity and rage.

“Any Scottish writer would be appalled by this,” said Lochhead, the award winning poet and playwright. “We write in English – but sometimes not. I can’t imagine how this can happen, without anyone being consulted. There must be a very strong protest. The British Isles is not England alone. This goes absolutely against the political and cultural movements in Scotland.”

The crime writer Ian Rankin – who has sold around 20 million copies of his novels worldwide – said he was mystified by the library's stance.

“There are specific cultural differences between the countries of the United Kingdom but this smoothes them all out, If I was Irish, I would think it very odd to find Irish poetry lumped in with English poetry. And it is very odd to find Hugh MacDiarmid listed as if he was Shakespeare,” said Rankin.

The novelist AL Kennedy – who recently won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year award for her novel Day – said that the decision was depressing and harked back to her literary apprenticeship in the 1980s, when Scottish writers were routinely treated as if they were part of the English tradition.

“There has always been this difficulty that English literature can mean literature in English. I have one collection of English literature in my house which contains only one author who is actually born in England. It is depressing that there are centres of very fine centre in America which specialise in the study of Scottish literature. It is disappointing that this has happened,” she said.

A spokesman for the Library of Congress said it would consider the issue again.