Making an Elephant: Writing from Within

By Graham Swift

From the acclaimed Booker Prize–winning author of Last Orders, this highly personal book is a singular and open-spirited account of a writer’s life.

In Making an Elephant, Swift brings together richly varied essays, portraits, poetry and interviews, full of insights into his passions and motivations, and wise about the friends, family and other writers who have mattered to him over the years. Kazuo Ishiguro advises on how to choose a guitar, Salman Rushdie arrives for Christmas under guard, and Ted Hughes shares the secrets of a Devon river. There are private moments, too, with long-dead writers, as well as musings on history and memory that readers of Swift’s novels will recognize and love.

Making an Elephant is a book of encounters: between a son and his father, between an author and his younger selves, between writer and reader, and between friends. It brims with charm and candour, and reveals Swift’s alertness to experience and his true engagement with words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: May 4, 2010
• ISBN: 9780307374202

Graham Swift

Graham Swift was born in 1949 and is the author of eleven novels, two collections of short stories, including the highly acclaimed England and Other Stories, and of Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. His most recent novel, Mothering Sunday, became an international bestseller and won The Hawthornden Prize for best work of imaginative literature. With Waterland he won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and with Last Orders the Booker Prize. Both novels were made into films. His work has appeared in over thirty languages.

Reviews for Making an Elephant

[booksx2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

For anyone who read and liked WATERLAND by Graham Swift, a must read. Non-fiction including previously published articles, interviews (with Swift himself and with Swift as the interviewer). Talks about the process of writing and how 'place' becomes part of a piece of writing.

[edwinbcn · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

To non-native speakers of English, the expression "making an elephant" immediately calls to mind the proverb, which, rendered into English would read "making an elephant out of a fly" from Latin elephantem ex musca facere which means to exaggerate the importance of something trivial.Although it can hardly have been the author's intention to suggest that meaning, unfortunately that meaning presents itself very persistently while reading this book. It is Graham Swift's first volume of miscellaneous writings, some autobiographical sketches, some literary criticism, some interviews, and 50 poems etc. Although the interviews themselves are quite insignificant, they nonetheless serve to define Graham Swift as a contemporary of writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Caryl Phillips and Patrick McGrath.Many pieces are quite uninteresting, and speak entirely for themselves. Nonetheless, and quite unprecedented, each piece of writing is preceded by an introduction of three to five pages! Utterly superfluous, verily making a mountain of a molehill.

[adrianburke_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I had largely given up on this author after 'Last Orders' but following my policy of picking up one random book each library visit I have changed my mind. I am really enjoying this and his insights into writers and writing. I will go back to his back list.