Graham swift joins angling partner ted hughes in british library archive
Fishing tips exchanged with the former poet laureate are among the highlights of a collection which includes manuscripts and correspondence with other Booker winnersThe British Library has acquired the archive of the Booker-prizewinning novelist Graham Swift, including handwritten manuscripts and drafts of his eight acclaimed novels as some intriguing letters. The latter correspondence with friends and contemporaries includes exchanges with his cherished angling companion, the late Ted Hughes – and an almighty squelch from his English teacher at Dulwich college in the 1960s, who marked a reference to TS Eliot in an essay by the aspiring author as “terribly snooty”.Swift described the experience of watching his life being driven away from the door of his London home, packed into 75 file boxes in the back of a white van, as “curiously akin to donating your body to medical science while still alive”.”There was also an element of feeling I was selling the family silver. Then I thought, well, I’m still alive, and healthy, and working – so suddenly it all felt like a tremendous relief, not having to worry about them any longer, not having to think what would happen to all those papers in the loft if there were a fire or a flood.”The archive includes letters, often on literary subjects, with friends such as the poet laureate Andrew Motion, and many fellow Booker-winning novelists including Kazuo Ishiguro, Pat Barker and Michael Ondaatje.The Ted Hughes correspondence barely mentions literature. The two men, both passionate anglers, were fishing friends on the river Torridge in Devon – a river in which, Swift recalled wistfully, it was possible to catch trout, salmon, or, on a really five-star day, sea-trout. “We rarely spoke even briefly of what we were working on,” Swift says. “For both of us fishing was an escape from all that. I miss him very much. …
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