Sunday Times Young Writers Award: Ben Fergusson

This week, I’ll be publishing interviews with the authors who have been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. In keeping with the theme of the awards, I’ll be asking questions about how the authors got started, their inspirations and their literary ambitions.

First up is Ben Fergusson, whose The Spring of Kasper Meier has already received the Historical Writers Association debut novel award. Set in Berlin in 1946, Kasper Meier is the story of a small-time racketeer drawn into a complex blackmail plot. Brilliantly evoking the ruined city, Fergusson confronts the moral decisions his characters face as they struggle for survival.

Ben Fergusson has worked as an art-book editor and publisher for ten years. You can read my review of Kasper Meier here.

• When did you first start writing seriously?

Hard to say – there are a lot stops along the way. I’ve been writing since I was a kid. I finished my first novel when I was about 23, but didn’t think it was good enough to send out to publishers, but I was nevertheless taking it very seriously at the point and was trying to write a novel that was good enough to get published. The first piece of fiction I had published when I was 27 and that was around the same time that I started writing The Spring of Kasper Meier, which is my first published novel. You could pick any of those dates, really.

• What was the first novel you ever finished, and was it published?

As mentioned above, it wasn’t published. It was called The August Party and was about a teenage house party in a village. I didn’t think it was something that I could get published, but it was a massive step just feeling that I could write to that length.

• What where the books which inspired you to write?

I don’t know if there were any books that specifically made me think I wanted to be a writer. The first writer I fell in love with, like most English kids of my age, I suppose, was Roald Dahl. I used to read his books on repeat, over and over again.

• Is there anyone you would consider your literary mentor?

Not someone I know. There are plenty of writers who have taught me a huge amount about writing, but that would be basically any book I’ve read by any good writer – you always pick up something while you’re reading.

• Did you do any formal training – creative writing courses or similar?

No MA, or anything. I studied English Literature at Warwick University, and while I was there you could take a module a year in another course; I took the creative writing module two years in a row, so I experienced a little bit of creative writing teaching that way. It was still important though, partly just having a ‘real’ writer – in my case, Maureen Freely – say some positive things about my writing.

• What is your ideal place to go when you write?

I tend to write wherever and whenever I can, because I still have a day job editing and translating art books. An ideal place would have no other clutter except my computer, which would have no internet connection, and my phone would be locked in a drawer. I quite like a nice view out of the window, but anything more than that is distracting.

• What’s your ambition for your fiction?

My ambition professionally is that I write well enough that I can keep writing as a job. In terms of the fiction itself, I suppose my ambition is just that people are touched by it and connect with it in some way.

• Who are your favourite contemporary writers?

In terms of living writers, Alice Munro would have to be on top of the list. As for younger writers, I have to say I was a Karl Ove Knausgaard early adopter – I loved the first book in his My Struggle series. I also read Colm Toibin for the first time this year, and really enjoyed it.

• Do you have a muse, and if so what form does it take?

My muse is the hour or so a day I have to squeeze in some writing.

• Can you pitch your book to someone who hasn’t read it?

I would probably just say that it’s a literary thriller about the gay one-eyed black-market trader blackmailed by a ‘rubble woman’ in the debris of post-war Berlin. The book follows the mystery behind the blackmail and the unlikely friendship that these two characters form. Hopefully that would be enough to tickle their fancy!