 Felly, wrth gwrs, wrth gwrs, mae'n cael ei gael i gael i gael i'r Wold Books Night 2021, ac yn y gallu gwahodd a'r selebu o bobl a'r ystyried, ymlaen i adael, mae'n gweithio'r bobl yn y bobl. Mae'n gweithio'r ysgrifennu gwahodd, mae'r ysgrifennu gwahodd a'r ysgrifennu gwahodd yn ymlaen i ddechrau'r ysgrifennu, mae'n dod o'ch bod, mae'n gweithio yn gweithio yn hon, mae'n mほio yn hwnnw, a hwnnw neud yn fflaenio ar hyn o gwahodd. Ono, mae'n amlwgr regretdol yn hynny'n gweithio'n cyffredinol sydd yn cynnwys. Mae'n unrhyw o gwahodd a'r ysgrifennu gwahodd, mae'n gwahodd o'r gwybod bob honnw, mae'n gwahod yn ymddangos, mae'n gwahod o'r llwyffneg, a dyma'r llwyddiad cyn fwy i ni, I was reading it, I thought it was a book about love, and it was just the book that we will need at the moment. So, ladies and gentlemen, could you please welcome Kazu Ishiguru? Hello! Are you there? Yes, I'm here. Hooray! I'm here, and I'm kind of almost embarrassed by the generosity of your introduction and your summary of Clara and the Sun. I'm glad you were doing it and not me. No, no, but it's sometimes odd isn't it when you're being interviewed and somebody tells you the whole plot of your own book and you're like, okay, I'll just sling my hook and go home. Anyway, you know, many people watching this because of course the book came out, it went to number one. I think it's the only book that's managed to dislodge Richard Osman this year, so you are a miracle worker apart from that. But many people will have read it, but of course many people will be reading it after this evening. So, just to start us off and we'll start with Clara and the Sun, which I am my beautiful assistant prepared earlier. Here is the beautiful book. Could you just tell us a little bit about the idea behind Clara and the Sun and where the ideas first came from, how it came to be the shape it is? Well, in a nutshell, I mean, Clara and the Sun is about, as you say up front, Clara is a little robot girl. She's like an AI robot girl. And at the beginning, she's sitting in the store with other kind of robot people. And she's been designed to prevent teenagers from becoming lonely. And so that's one of the very few things she knows that that's her purpose in life. And she tends to thereafter look at the whole human world through the lens of loneliness. You know, she wonders, you know, are those people outside the shop crossing that street to avoid loneliness? Did they do that because they were lonely? Are these joggers going by lonely? So that's one of the ways she tends to look at the world. And the other thing is she's so depowered. So she tends to think there is this kind of very powerful benign being watching over everybody, not just her, but over the human beings as well, which is a sun. And she has this touching childlike faith that the sun is watching over her and that he's kind and that he's powerful and that he'll come to her help. And the story is basically about how she goes to join a human family and how she tries to help that family and will save that family from heartbreak. So that's all I can really say about the story. But you're asking about the genesis of it. Actually, it started not as a variation on kind of Android cybor kind of stories actually. It came out of thinking about books for children, like very small children, these picture books with illustrations in the story that you can read out to your, you know, five-year-old or six-year-old as a bedtime story. I did actually literally have a nice little, well, I thought it was a nice little story, more or less the story of Clara and the Sun, except my daughter, my adult daughter Naomi Shiguro, the novelist, who was working in a bookstore at the time, just told me, I must go nowhere near young children with that story. A traumatised her. So I thought, OK, it's going to have to be a dystopian adult dark story. I mean, one of the things that's so amazing about Clara is that I'm not surprised to know that it came in a way of genesis from a children's story, but she is, and it's an irony that she's incredibly distinctive. So she's an AF, an artificial friend, and they all in the shop are worried about being superseded by the next model, all of these kind of things. But at the same time, Clara has very distinct and clear personality on the page. So was she always your voice into this book? Or did you want to write about loneliness or gene mapping or the way that science is actually a lot of this is already there? You know, did you think of it as a companion piece to never let me go? Or was it Clara that led you to the story? I think it was Clara. I think it was Clara. Now, as I say, in this children's version, which can be told in a few minutes, there was nothing about gene editing or artificial intelligence even. You know, my original Clara was going to be either a soft toy or an animal or a doll in the way that you would have in a book, a picture book for small children. So Clara came from that direction and quite independently of that. I had been quite deeply interested in both artificial intelligence and gene editing for some time and quite fortunately, perhaps because of Never Let Me Go, I had been invited to various kind of seminars and discussion groups. And I got to know a lot of people who are prominent in those fields and heard a lot of the discussions, both the excitement and the fears about the huge changes that will be brought on our society by these developments. And also, you know, I think I became aware of how rapidly these fields were developing and that we were almost sleepwalking into a situation where we're not quite sure what we can and can't do. And so those two things kind of came together, the little children's story, and I suppose all my concerns and interest and excitement about these massive developments in the world. I mean, obviously, we don't want to give anything away in terms of the story story of the book. But when you were writing, did you have an end point, either an emotional end point in that you wanted the reader to shut their book and feel one particular way or another particular way? Or an end point in terms of what you wanted to have told us, the reader, about the world of gene editing and the possibilities and the dangers of it? Or did you just see where the story came out of, your interests? With all my books, the one thing I do know when I start writing the actual words on the page, I do know where I intend to end. Do you? Yeah, I always know that. Now, this isn't interesting because I'd be curious to know which camp you're in, Kate, because I sense that when I talk to other writers about this, the people who aren't in my camp are completely shocked. They say, how can you possibly spend ages and ages writing something you know where you're going, how boring. And I'm equally shocked that someone can actually spend their time so much time not knowing where they're going. It seems scary and weird to me. I mean, it's like driving in the dark with your headlights on. I don't know the path I'm going to take to that ending. But when I actually start to write the book after I finished all the planning and the thinking, I feel I'm ready to write the actual words because I know where I'm going to land. And actually, the ending in some ways is the summary of the whole book. I want to leave the reader with a set of quite complex emotions. Not so much the ideas. I'm not really bothered about warning people about society, what's going to happen in society. I mean, it's better just to write an op-ed piece in the FT or something to do that and then move on. I mean, I think the novel does have a function to contribute to these debates, but I think there are better ways to do it. I mean, for me, when I write a novel, I do want to leave people with a particular set of emotions. And they're not emotions that I can actually necessarily categorise in words. And that's why I have to write the novel. But I do know I'm aiming for this thing at the end. And often I don't achieve it, but that's what I'm aiming for. And so the ending, the literal ending, what's happening, what kind of setting it is. I mean, I always have that in my mind because that's the shell. That's the container in which this point. You're like Christian and Pilgrim's Progress. You know you're going to end at the Celestial City, but you don't quite know how you're going to get there. You've got me there. I've never read Pilgrim's Progress. Oh my, no, we're here on World Book Night and you're admitting to that catastrophe. I'll never be invited back to interview anybody again. There are many, many, many things I have not read. No, no. You're going to come out with all these learned... No, that's the end of it. I love Pilgrim's Progress. I see, for me, that's always quite a metaphor for writing because that's how I think I write, which is I know the type of book it is and I know the shape of it and I know the real stuff behind the imagined stuff that I'm going to make up. But what's going to happen between that I don't know. So I always use that. Do you see what I mean? So it's not the same. I'm neither in your camp nor in the other camp. It's not that I'm just free running, but it's just that idea. I think it's so interesting because Clara the Sun is so warm and so fresh on the page. And that is an incredible skill if you know what's going to be happening. Because sometimes I think writers need the adrenaline and the fear. They need to discover for themselves in order to put that on the page. Whereas you have a freshness without the fear, presumably. Or are you still terrified when you're writing that it won't work out? I'm always terrified that it's not going to work out. I'm always convinced that it's not going to work out. I always think it's a complete fluke that I've got to finish the novel. I've never really settled to just a kind of a set of reliable techniques and formulae. Every time I feel I'm having to kind of make it up again how you do it. Maybe that's why maybe the freshness is why it's so wonderful and why everybody couldn't wait for Clara and the Sun to come out. That they were so ready for the next book for me. Can I just slightly take us on into research? Because you mentioned that one of the reasons, you know, because of Never Let Me Go, was it Harold Pinter who said you found it absolutely terrifying? Yes, except I got a postcard from him when I published that book. And it said it is, but he didn't say absolutely terrifying. He used another exclamation mark, Harold. And that's all he said. Well, yes, I can imagine it. It was a fruity word. I mean, you know, that is a darker and starker novel. But with Clara and the Sun, you mentioned because of Never Let Me Go, you have met many people working in the areas of gene editing. You've been talking to people that really know this at the front end, not simply reading about it in newspapers, magazines and so on. So how much research did you feel you needed to do beyond what you had already learned? I mean, did you go and check particular phrases, you know, want to make sure that you have particular types of science in or didn't include it? No, actually, this was a case where something that I had actually been quite immersed in, independent of wanting to write a novel just happened to come in handy for the novel. So I didn't actually do any research specifically for the book. There was just one little passage where I just needed the detail of a chemical fluid that comes out of Clara's ear or something that does something to a machine. And for that, I did actually, it was a rather kind of sledgehammer on a nut thing, but I did actually contact the then president of the Royal Society, who's a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, to ask him what kind of, oh, thank you, I'm a Christian. I asked him, thank you, what kind of fluid might come out of a little girl robot ear? I'm sure he had all this really important stuff to do, but he was very good and he got into the spirit of it, and he advised me of the process, you know, what might come out, what it might do, what it might do to this machine if she used it. That was the only actual specific thing like that. Do you enjoy research or do you not enjoy research? No, I'm probably the complete opposite to you, but this too I want to hear from you about this. But I tend to, I tend to feel that the research I do, I'm just covering for myself the fact that I don't do a lot of conscientious research. All right, so this is my excuse. I think my research often is that I'm researching the imaginary world in which my novel must take place. Now I need to know how the characters talk, I need to know about the relationships, but I need to know weird things like, to what extent does my fictional world deviate from the real world, the one that we're sitting in now? Is it slightly bizarre? Is it off-kilter? I need to know its moods. It's kind of the kind of sense of humour that prevails in it. I need to know all those kinds of things, its colours. And so that's not, I feel I can't go to a library or spend a lot of time online finding out about that. I can only find that in my head. And I do spend a long, long time writing little things on pieces of paper, not things that would end up in the book, but just trying to pick up the colours and the mores and so on of this other world. And actually, because I do this, I end up with loads and loads of potential fictional worlds. I just don't have stories to go in them. And for some years, I've got this, there's a fictional world I'm dying to use in a novel, but it's just like a shell of a novel, nothing to go inside it. So I always feel, for me, that's where a lot of my research energy goes. And often I tend to, the hard stuff, the historical stuff, the details, I'd either check up on that after I've shaped up my story, or I'll bring to the novel the stuff I'm already knowledgeable about. Because I have certain enthousiasms, nerdy bits of knowledge about guitar chord sequences and things like this. So I tend to use the things I know about. But I mean, you're legendary for your research. But do you actually know already what the research is for? I mean, in other words, you have the story there already and you're using the research to give the thing baddest or do the stories emerge out of the research? Exactly. It's more that. I work very much the other way round from you in that I need to build a quote real world by which, of course, I mean an artificial version of a world that once existed because it's not the real world. I'm writing about 16th Century France and it's my version from everything I've read and researched about it. But I need that as a stage set before I can imagine characters in it and before my imagination can tell the story because place is the most important thing to me, probably, more than anything else. So it's the idea that a story can only happen in the place that it's happening. Whereas I think with exquisite fiction, as I like to think of it and you are the king of exquisite fiction, is that there is a sort of shimmering that is about imagination that is free floating. It isn't pinned down in quite the same sort of way as fiction like mine is because I write imagined characters but against the backdrop of real history and I feel I've got a responsibility to get the real history right. So I think it's a very different way but picking up your point about the things that you need to know and therefore the research that you don't need to do because actually you're doing your research within yourself, essentially. With Clara, who is such a wonderful character and it seems crazy to call as you say your little robot girl a character, a person, but she feels like that. When you start writing a character like that that is utterly imagined, do you know whether she will sleep or how she'll sleep? Do you know whether she will need to be nourished except from the sun or be able to engage with her friend, the friend that she's looking after in terms of eating or all of these kind of things. The things that make her not human but also make her emotions human. How much of that do you know? Does that come from your imagination? I tend to know all of that before I start to write. I start writing at a very late stage. Perhaps we're not so different but it's a question of at which point do you actually start to write the actual words. But when you look at the whole enterprise overall maybe there isn't such a big difference. It's just that some writers prefer to start writing the actual words quite early on and a lot of this exploratory process happens while they're actually writing the prose. And then they revise it and revise it and the story emerges. I tend to think off the actual prose pages. I make a lot of notes, I do little trial things. Sometimes I could spend a year and a half just planning a book and trying to figure out the ideas. A little bit like maybe filmmakers, they spend ages on the script and then they go out there and they shoot the film. So for me the actual writing of the words end up in the book. It's a bit like going out there once you've got your script. So it might not be so different. It's just the timing of which stage you actually start the thing. So things like the details like, you know, does Clara sleep? Does she go to the loo? Or this kind of thing. I have to kind of figure out. And that's relatively easy. And in some ways it's much easier than having a narrator that is say a refugee from a conflict in the Middle East who's turned up in North London or something like that. Because then I feel enormous obligation to get things right. And there's a huge duty not to misrepresent. But I mean, if it's something like an AI robot girl, I mean, you know, I have enormous freedom. So it's quite liberating in that sense. And I can focus entirely on what I want to focus on. But for me the big question that I could never settle while I was writing this book and possibly readers will feel when they're reading it. I couldn't really figure out whether Clara really has proper emotions. Does she really feel things as we do, as human beings do? Or does she just simply kind of register human emotions? She learns what human emotions are and she just kind of clocks them, you know? And when she says she's kind of afraid or she's happy, I mean, is she afraid or happy in the way that we are? Or is she just saying that her goal or her purpose has just been frustrated or that she thinks it's going to be frustrated? I mean, I'm not sure. I really don't know. I read it as a kind of act of generosity from you as the writer. That there was, if you like, enough white space in your writing for the reader to bring her or his own reaction to that so that you weren't saying categorically one thing or another where she was on that scale, but that actually each of us would bring our feelings about Clara and possibly about ourselves and how we engage with the world to the analysis of that. So I saw it as a generous not pinning it down quite too much as a reader is how I felt. I'm going to remember that answer. People keep asking me this question that I just posed. That's a very good way to put it. But I should say possibly my focus in this book isn't so much Clara and how human issue is she not. It's the humans. The idea we have about human beings having souls and being very individual. Yeah, and is that true? And how is that true? Yeah, is that is that something we've kind of slightly overstated? Or is it a hangover from some kind of past age a more superstitious religious age? Well, you know, that that was something else that I wanted to ask you about. This sort of, you know, this is an AI world as opposed to a supernatural world or a ghost world or any of these things. But at the same time, Clara's nourishment comes from the sun. And obviously that goes all the way back. You one could say to ancient Egypt and the worship of the sun and and all of those things that were enormously fundamental to that society in the same way that Clara's son is fundamental to her. And I wondered about where you saw in this question of asking about how individual people are, whether we can ever be anything but lonely. This idea of the ghosts and the spirits and the ideas that we put on the people who have died or that we think we understand. It all kind of lives in that same sort of world, doesn't it? That we can't ever quite know what somebody else is thinking and we can't ever quite know what's true. Yes, I mean, the loneliness that perhaps Clara sees in human beings isn't just the everyday loneliness of maybe not having many neighbours where you live or not seeing your friends. She starts to think maybe human beings as a species are peculiarly lonely in a fundamental way that maybe the very thing that makes human beings rather special, which is their complexity and their individuality actually kind of dooms them to a certain kind of fundamental loneliness. The very fact that we're able to build very complex personalities around ourselves means that we're also building this very complex kind of castle around ourselves and it's quite difficult to build bridges to the next one. Even if that person is a member of your family or your spouse. So there is something about human beings that is perhaps fundamentally lonely. And I think that that's one of the things that Clara starts to focus in on. When I say I keep saying Clara, I mean, you know, as I say, it's quite convenient to hide behind this feature. I mean, that's one of the great things about using a narrator like Clara. You can, you know, it allows you to focus on just the questions that you want to focus on. She's a very kind of clean tool, if you like, because she she she doesn't have any kind of past baggage. She doesn't bring a whole set of kind of values from a different world or different society with her. She she's just picking up things from the human world almost in real time. So so it is quite possible to focus. I mean, she's like a she's like a kind of baby or small child. And so it's quite it's quite convenient to sort of focus in on what I want to focus in on. When when you were writing this novel in particular, but maybe all of your, you know, extended out to when you're writing generally. Do you feel excited when you sit down? Or do you feel like here we go, you know, resolute? You know, what do you have that butterfly feeling at the beginning of a new book or at the end of the book? You know, how do you not Clara, not your narrator, not any of the characters, but how do you as the author feel emotionally in and out of a book when you're writing? Well, the most exciting time for me is is before I've really started working on the book. And I think, oh, you know, this might be a but soon as I'm even started to plan it, it just feels like a massive slog. And I think and I think, well, I'm never going to be able to do this. How on earth did I do it before? You know, what can I steal? How can I cheat, you know, my way through this? And so I wouldn't say that I sit down with excitement once. I mean, you know, when it's all potential, then it's terribly exciting. You know, I think, oh, you know, that's why I'm rather drawn by genres. You know, I think, oh, I really fancy doing a doing a Victorian crime thread. Oh, I want to do a monster thing or something. And then I'm enthusiastic, but soon as I look at my sheets of paper and I realize what this involves, I think, oh, this is a huge amount to work. So on the day by day basis, I'm not sitting there excited. However, I suppose I only I only start to work on a book when I feel a real sense that unless I do this thing, this thing won't come into existence and nobody else is going to bring it into existence. And I really, really want it to come into existence. And so there's that sense of urgency and responsibility. It's only me. I mean, it's like a slightly less acute version of when you wake up and you want to remember the dream you are having. And there's a slight panic that it's kind of fading by the second. And unless you tell somebody and, you know, and of course, it's very boring to tell somebody your dream, but, you know, but you do it anyway because that's the only way to sort of keep it in your head. I mean, it feels a bit like that, except, you know, prolonged over a length of time. But I feel I've got to get it down. I've got to keep working at this otherwise it's going to fade forever. Yeah, I always feel that characters, if I'm not doing it, that they're kind of standing in the wings and you can see the cobwebs, you know, that they're kind of stuck, sort of misharish them like, and that is your fault. So you've got to get them out. So I do a complete that. You just mentioned different genres. You have written screenplays and, you know, you enjoy writing in different forms, I would say, in your fiction. So what is it that makes you decide the tone of a piece of work? You know, what is different for you when you're going to write a screenplay? What is different for you when you're going to write a novel that is very much set in a real place or very much set in an imagined place? You know, do you think of that as genre? Or is it just the story itself tells you what it needs? Well, this genre question, let's leave aside the screenplay fiction distinction for now because I wanted to ask you about this as well. Just stay with written fiction. Genre in terms of written fiction is something, as I said, you know, I quite, I'm a bit like a tourist, you know, or maybe I'm just going to be a bit promiscuous about genre. I kind of keep looking over there and thinking, oh, that's really good. I'll see that. Yeah, I want to go there. What would happen if I, and so I've always tended to want to do that, you know, but I in the end, I think it goes back to what we were saying before. Your fiction depends to some extent on the setting in history and in geography. My stories are much more movable and to some extent I can decide quite late on in the proceedings where I'm going to put this story down, where in history, where in time it could be in the future, it could be in the weird world, it could be in the historically realistic world. So in a sense, I can kind of, I can look at a menu and that includes genre. And so it's quite exciting to me because I'm not obliged to stick to one place. This same story, and in fact, I have to confess, probably a lot of people have noticed this. Through the course of my career, I have often retold the same story just in different genres or different settings. But because people are very literal minded, they often say, oh, he's made a huge departure. I notice this particularly between my second and third novels. But they're very, very similar. It's the same story. Is that because you want to try a different way of telling the same story? Or is it about skill? It's because I work on a novel and at the end I realise that it hasn't quite done what I wanted it to do. Or it's become apparent during the writing of the book that there's something missing. So in my second novel, my second novel, an artist of the floating world, is set entirely in Japan. And it's about a guy who wastes his life for all kinds of reasons. But I realised towards the end of the writing of that book that it's only about the wasted life in terms of a career. And I thought, well, there are the ways in which you can waste your life that are very important in your personal life. If you don't allow yourself to love and be loved. But it's too late to start doing that now with this book. But let's do it again, but have this dimension as well. And so I wrote The Remains of the Day, which is a very similar story, but has this other story. He doesn't just waste his life in terms of career. But he's also in the arena of the emotions. He doesn't allow himself to love or be loved. But of course, people thought I'd made a huge departure. Oh, how brave of him, because he used to always write books in Japan with Japanese characters. And this is entirely in England, in English characters. But for me, it's quite easy. I just moved the stories around. I think you've let the cat out of the bag now. But I mean, it's sort of, but I love the idea that, you know, you won the Whitbread Prize for an artist of the floating world. And then you won the Booker Prize for The Remains of the Days. So that seems to me a work of a man of genius, frankly, if you feel that they're the same novel. It's well, they think if they think if it's set in England, it deserves a slightly bigger prize. Absolutely. That's it. Well, we'll come on to prizes in a moment. I'm keeping an eye on the time, but just just to finish on the question of genre. A moment ago, you were talking about your imagined worlds and I'm still kind of haunted by that. The idea of the worlds that haven't yet got the story to go in them. Now, if I was your publishers listening to this, I would be putting on speed dial all the best illustrators in the world of Magna and cartoons and things to try and create a book about the as yet untold worlds of Kazoo-ishiguru. See, that seems to me a perfect departure, a kind of picture book for adults. What do you think? There'll be no stories to put in them. I mean, this is the problem. They'll be beautiful. They'll be beautiful. I have the same thing about titles. I've got great titles, but no stories to go with them. I mean, I don't know what you do about titles, Kate. I don't know if they come organically. I mean, you have lovely titles. I mean, I don't know if they come organically out of your stories. I have a real problem with titles. Do you? I have a whole list of great titles I've thought of in the past with those stories to go with them. And then I have stories and I can't think of appropriate titles. And I'm often tempted to actually slightly rewrite the story to make it fit one of the good titles. I know you see them now. I've got this brilliant image in my mind of a novel by you. Obviously, a woman or a man goes into a hall and it's almost like a school hall and they're hanging on all the pegs are the beautiful titles. And then you open different doors and there are different worlds in there. And it's up to the narrator to choose the right to put them together. I think this is a fantastic idea anyway. Kate, just getting back to genre and I kind of wanted to ask you this. I mean, what is your feeling about the genres as they're kind of officially defined in bookstores at the moment? Because I mean, this event is about reading and I mean, I sometimes think, well, in fact, all right, I often think this over insistence on genres and genre boundaries is actually why it's quite useful up to a certain point in marketing books and getting certain books to certain constituencies of readers. I'm beginning to think increasingly that it's actually it's impeding people from reading the books and discovering books that they would really love. I, you know, I kind of think genre boundaries are getting unhelpful and I also think they're unhelpful for writers, you know, that writers feel they have to write within a certain boundary, they can't cross over or they can't even use certain motifs or things that are often used in another genre. And there's an implied hierarchy or genres, which really I think is becoming very negative and I think it's impeding the way we I think we could read much more freely and broadly and with with more diversity. I don't just mean in terms of, you know, the race or whatever or the gender of the writers. I mean, just where ideas and feelings are coming from. If we if we just didn't take these genres too seriously. Yeah, well, I mean, I know I do agree with that. And I mean, this is obviously we're celebrating the World Book Night and it was set up by people, including Jamie Bring, who's the CEO of Canon Gate. And the idea was absolutely to celebrate reading in all its forms and to share readers to share with each other books that they loved. And of course, the reading agency is such a brilliant charity and getting books out there to lots of different communities as well. It is all part of how you encourage people to see reading as wonderful and a joy and a pleasure and to do more of it, you know, and all the nourishment that it will bring and all of these sorts of things. And so I understand the need in some ways for genre in a bookshop. And I understand and we'll maybe talk about prizes because again, I think that sometimes prizes do introduce works of quality to a wider readership and it also helps against the tyranny of the frontlist because when you go into a bookshop or a supermarket, you will often find the same group of books. You know, this year's colour, you me a load of other people is orange. Next year it will be red or something else. And so you do often have to hunt more widely. You know, the idea that everything is available is it's technically true, but actually there's so much. It becomes just white noise. The thing that I always remember is being at university and a brilliant tutor talking about this issue of what was valued and what was not valued in literature and saying in their day, Jonathan Swift was the Booker Prize winning author and Daniel Defoe was the a bit dodgy, you know, news of the world, you know, all of those sorts of things. He said, but now we see them both as literature. And I think Margaret Atwood also says something about, you know, books, you know, there are good books and bad books of their type. And I think what only thing that any of us can do as writers to connect with readers is write the best book we're capable of writing and not categorise ourselves. You know, the bookshops are going to do it and we're talking about Clara and the Sun and algorithms and how, you know, books are chosen. But I agree. I think people writers get siloed very easily into a narrow round. Well, I'll tell you this experience, Kate. I mean, I'm 66 years old now. When I wrote, before I wrote Never Let Me Go, I didn't feel I had a kind of permission to use sci-fi techniques. Right. Well, let's say, you know, a few years before I started to write them, but I didn't think I had the right to go there or that I should go there or there was, you know, in some way I was even lowering myself. Despite winning the booker. Well, because of those things, I should stay in my little box as this kind of highbrow literary author and I shouldn't be doing things like writing sci-fi. What happened to me then was that I saw what writers who were about 15, 16 years younger than me were doing. You know, I became friendly with people like David Mitchell, Alex Garn and the filmmaker who also wrote that brilliant book, The Beach, back then. And I realized that they really embraced things like graphic novels, sci-fi, video games. And I thought, oh, you know, these are brilliant younger writers and they have a completely different attitude in this particular case, the genre of science fiction and fantasy. And that was what enabled me to have the courage, if you like, or give myself permission to write Never Let Me Go. Because that was a book that I had struggled to write for many years and it was only until I thought of the kind of the sci-fi setting that I was able to finish it because I could never quite get that book to work at the first two times I tried it. And then I thought, oh, I can make it like a sci-fi book. And it required the kind of the different attitude of the younger generation at that point. And that's fantastic. To broaden my ability, to broaden my, give my imagination permission. And that's when I became very aware that there is something about these kind of genre boundaries that actually they're quite inhibiting for the writer as well as for the reader. Do you think how similar are you as your reading self to your writing self? You know, in terms of that. That's an interesting question. Yeah, because that sometimes plays its part. You know, I'm a completely different reader from the writer I am. How interesting. So, you know, and I just wondered, you know, what reading meant to you in that context? I mean, you know, how much you read and how much you read in the areas that you might be writing in. You know, did you, when you realised this with Never Let Me Go, did you then start to read science fiction when you hadn't before or were you already a science? And I'm just interested in the two sides of you, the reader-writer side. Yeah, I still don't read a lot of what you call hard science fiction. I probably watch more movies like that, you know. So, I may not be that close. I'm not sure if I want to read the kind of books I write. And certainly a lot of my favourite authors are not very much like me. You know, I like people like Dostiewski and people like this. And I don't write in that style at all, you know. But that's an interesting question. And I don't know. I mean, I'm kind of tempted to ask you if you don't write books that are like the ones that you like to read. I mean, why is that? Aren't you ever tempted to write books like the ones that you like to read? Or do you deliberately think, you know, there should be the separation that there should be some sort of distance? It when I first started writing, I thought because of I love crime and I love, you know, the phrase I said before I use for exquisite fiction. I just feel that's I prefer that to literary fiction, which I always think carries a sneer with it, which it isn't necessarily meant. But, you know, books that are beautiful in the in the sentence structure and the language on the page. So those were the two areas that I really read a lot in. I've always read a lot of historical fiction, but those other two. So when I started writing, I was always on my own shoulder. There was no integrity about the book because I was writing it from the outside in rather than the inside out. And so, you know, I write something out. I go, you know, that's not very good. That's not very literary. It's not very exquisite. And it was only when I finally went to Cacassan and fell in love with the history and started to think about realize that the things that were in my head were a novel, not things I'd read. And that was a novel that became labyrinth. And then that's why I asked you the question about how you feel when you sit down. Because the first time I sat down to start writing that, I felt incredibly excited and incredibly nervous because I knew that finally five books in, I might have found what my voice was supposed to be. But I think that I absolutely identify with that actually. And now that I've heard you say that, I realize that there are many books that I aspire, you know, I love and, you know, I feel, if only I could write books like that. But for that reason, not because perhaps, because I can't technically kind of imitate that kind of thing to some degree, but I wouldn't own it. It wouldn't have intentionality. It wouldn't actually be something coming from me. And that's why I think there are many, many books that I really like. But, you know, I wouldn't even attempt to go there. Because I think this is very important what you said. You know, it's important that the novel that you write does actually come from you in some kind of deep way. There has to be that relationship. And of course, a novel that you love doesn't have to have that at all. But there's one other thing I wanted to say about this reading thing, Kate. I mean, that you're talking about before. When my daughter, our daughter was much younger, Ben Ochre, the novelist and poet, you know, recommended to her in a postcard. He said, this is what you must remember. You know, don't pay too much attention to the books that are recommended to you by adults. Because each of us has a secret trail. I'm paraphrasing what he said. Each of us has a secret trail of books. And it's very important to try and follow the secret trail. And I think that was quite a profound thing, he said. You know, it's giving advice to a girl of 9 or 10. And this thing that you referred to earlier on about the front list and this constant cycle of books that are promoted every month by the publishers and the book stores and so on. Of course, that's very important and you and I benefit enormously from that, you know. And we are part of that. Absolutely, we completely do. We are part of that. We are totally part of it. But I sometimes worry that this secret trail, which I think is perhaps really vital to good reading, is just destroyed and damaged and vandalised by this external machine that says, this month, read this. This is the one that everybody in book groups is reading. Whereas I kind of know what Ben means. There's a part of us that reads one book and then we want to read for reasons that are very difficult to actually pin down. It triggers something else and you want to read this other book. Not necessarily by a similar book or by the same author, but you just really want to read this other book and then another book. And sometimes that trail isn't about books that are just coming out now. You know, one book will lead you to some book that was published in 1922 and then to the book that's published in a different country maybe 15 years ago. I mean, it's a really complex and personal and intimate trail and I think people really get to read well. They have a kind of a confidence or a strength to keep following their trail. And yes, of course, it's important to pay attention to the latest books that are coming out. But I do sometimes wonder, but this is why I think libraries are very important. This is why second hand bookshops, antiquarian bookshops are very important. And I think as you point out, just in the area of modern fiction, I think your prices are very important because it forms an alternative curating machinery, I suppose. And of course, this is partly what World Book Night was set up to do and does in that it celebrates writing all over and a range of books and reminding people that there are wonderful books that they might not yet have read. And of course, the reading agency is absolutely committed to inspiring people to read more and more and share what they're reading. And hopefully people listening to you this evening, it would be great if they could go on social media and share the books they are reading. It would be wonderful to just put some of those. I think the secret trail is a lovely, lovely way of putting it. But we are going to run out of time, of course. We knew we would. So I do two chatterboxes allowed together. But I did just want to ask before we finish about that this is your prizes because we've touched on it, the idea that prizes do help to get works to a much wider range of readers than they might otherwise reach. You have won all the things in the field of serious book prizes. I just wondered when you hear your name called out and you've won the Booker Prize or you get, I believe, a phone call out of the blue and you get told in 2017 that you've won the Nobel Prize. Does it make a difference to how you feel about a book if it becomes a prize-winning book? Does it make you think, oh, yeah, that book's got its due? Or is it just a lovely thing, but it doesn't? You know, how much difference, I suppose? What I'm asking is, as someone who doesn't win prizes, how much difference does it make to you about how you feel as yourself as a writer and the readers you might reach? Are you talking about how I feel about my own writing? Are you talking about what do I feel about other books that I know are prize-winning books? No, about yourself. I suppose I'm saying in a rather crude way, does it matter to you, but how did you feel when they rang up and did you win the Nobel Prize? It's a bit of a shock, actually, because there's no warning. With a booker, things like that, most prizes, there's a kind of a rumbling thunder coming towards you, and you worry about, are you going to win it? Are you going to be shortlisted? The Nobel just comes out of a completely clear blue sky. Bang! You're sitting at your table eating breakfast and bang. Half an hour later, your Nobel Prize win and all these, the world press are gathered at going all the way down your garden path and you don't know what on earth to say or do. Prices are, I feel incredibly lucky to have won the prizes I've been given, but I think there's a large element of luck. I think there are writers who are certainly as good as me and there are writers who are better than me that have not received anything like the kind of accolades that I have. It reflects various kinds of forces that are in play at the time, culturally. But I'd like to think, something like the Nobel, I won it on behalf of a writing community, a generation of writers with a certain set of values. I'm glad that writing is represented alongside the sciences and peace and the economics as something worthy of getting this kind of very high prize. But I'd say when I get prizes like that, it happens in a different planet, a parallel universe to the one in which I write. It goes back to what I was saying earlier. When I come back to my study, I did rather think when I came back from Stockholm somebody would have actually redone my study for me to make it more grand and there'll be cornicing and all this kind of stuff. It wasn't, it was just this complete mess, as it always was. The bits of Clara and the Sun in progress were exactly the same problems. It seemed just as difficult. It seemed like something that happened to a different person. Some avatar went up there and got these prizes. I think that's fine. I don't want to devalue the honour at all, but it's got nothing to do with my writing life. I have a very lonely sense of success and failure that happens in my study. You can give me all the prizes in the world or some people think people have already have. It doesn't make things any easier. I still think that hasn't come out the way I want it to. That doesn't work. All these things are still there. They're great for introducing authors to readers and new work. I think the fantastic thing about prizes, what I love about prizes is when they highlight some author that has been working in relative obscurity for years and years. They've just gone at it, even though they haven't had big sales or prizes in the past. Often somebody in middle age or approaching old age is spotlighted by something like a major prize. We've seen that happen over and over again with Bernadine Everisto, with Anna Burns in the past, with writers like A.S. Byatt. I love it when that happens. Hillary Mantell, a classic example of somebody who just kept writing and writing and writing and people didn't really pay a huge amount of attention to her. The prize unveils a very important major writer and a whole kind of urge that we have. All those books, it's so exciting. I think that's when prizes are really, really important. Everybody listening is very glad, however, that you've won these prizes because it is that sense. Prices also keep books on the shelf and that matters a great deal, I think. Now, we have obviously run out of time. We're always going to, but we still have just the rest of the evening. There is the theme of this 10th anniversary of World Book Night is books to make you smile. So I wonder if you have a book that you can share with everybody, a book that makes you smile, that matters to you. OK, look, so we haven't got a long... It's a very... All right, it's not a very colourful cover. I realise it's a Persephone book and all Persephone books are great, but this one is called The Fortnite in September and it's written by R.C. Sheriff in 1931 and he's most famous for his play, The Journey's End, the First World War play, but this is a very beautiful, gentle kind of comedy about a very kind of nice, but kind of ordinary lower middle class family in England who just go on their summer holiday to the seaside, I think, to Bogdor Regis. And that's all it's about. But it's not like Ford about funny or anything. It's not full of jokes, but it's full of this kind of tender humour. He never patronises the family. He doesn't satirise them. They come out as actually incredibly loving to each other and they have an enormous amount of dignity and power because of that. And it's not a book that makes you laugh, but it makes you smile because it's, I think it's a celebration of what family can do, what ordinary human decent instincts can do to give people strength. So I think it's a lovely book. Nothing dramatic happens, nothing violent happens, but it makes you smile. Perfect. That couldn't be more perfect. And I'm going to be sneaky and have interviewers' privilege here and ask you one last question because now I really want to know is how often do you reread books? Listening to you talk about that with great affection and warmth. It sounds like it might be a novel that you've gone back to several times, but do you reread favourite books? Yeah, I do. And I'm often shocked at the length of time that has passed. And often I have this experience. I mean, at the beginning of the lockdown, this time last year, I reread war and peace. And I often have this experience. I think, oh, it's not nearly as good as I thought it was. It's not bad, but I can see all these faults. It's always the danger, isn't it? All these faults. And that often happens to me. Books that I thought were fantastic when I was younger, I read it and think it's an awful lot wrong with it. But the other way round as well. But do you reread a lock, Kate? Yeah, I reread during lockdown and this is the second World Book Night that is being held in semi-lockdown or lockdown. I have found great comfort in books that I know very well. So I have reread basically all the golden age detective stories that I have in the house. So at this point about 300 golden age detective stories I have read, all of Agatha Christie, all of Patricia Wentworth, all of Georgette Hare, all of Niomarsh. You know, the whole lot. I've read them all before. What about Josephine Tay? Love Josephine Tay. Love Josephine Tay. The franchise affair. And the tiger and the smoke. I mean, that's, you know, and this again, this is why I suppose this is wonderful that we're kicking off World Book Night in this way because it is about the joy of reading that keeps us company the whole way through our lives whether we're writers or not. So we have had a brilliant time listening to you. I could obviously keep asking you questions for a very long time but then we won't get all the rest of the lovely stuff that's going to happen this evening. Am I allowed to just leave with just one kind of thing hanging? Yes. Okay, a kind of question that I could put to you and to everyone listening. What is it about some books that make them linger in our minds long after we've read, finished reading them? You know, that's something that I've been thinking about more and more and more because I mean, there's a lot of attention. We pay a lot of attention to how books grip us or what they do to us during the reading experience. But after we close the book, there are some books that just stay with us in a way that may be like a song or something that haunts us would stay with us. Sometimes not just days and weeks, but for years. And I think that's a really important part of the reading experience. There are some books that are fantastic while you're reading them. But the really valuable ones, the ones that linger, I would like to know. It's a pity we've run out of time because this is one of the things I was going to ask you. Do you have any idea, Kate, why some books do this and some books don't? Because if I could bottle it, you know, that would make my life a lot easier. Obviously, and obviously I've remiss that we're not going to have time to do that. Well, but I suppose I think you're absolutely right that some books do linger. And I think, I mean, so for me, if I was, if I was to say one book, for me it would be still would be Wuthering Heights and it would be because I read it first when I was 14 or 15 and it felt like a discovery because it was one of the first real books as it were as opposed to a school book, oddly, that I felt I'd discovered for myself. It wasn't pressed into my hand. I didn't have to write an essay about it. So I could read it as a reader, not as a student. I think then I've reread it because the emotions of that book are too big for a 14-year-old. You don't understand any of it. You know, it's not a love story. It's never been a love story, you know, but it's a story of obsession and violence and race and haunting and place and all of these things. And it's a book that therefore I have gone back to every decade of my life when I'm nearly 60 to see if I can understand it a bit better, to try to understand what it is that makes it that book that if there was one and the house is on fire and you put your hand out, it would be my old battered copy with a terrible regency cover which is completely inappropriate in the pages are all yellow. And I don't know if you have a book because that's the only way I can answer that is to think of the book that means that to me and try and work out why that might linger. I see what you mean. I mean, Wuthering Heights perhaps wouldn't be my choice but I can absolutely see why. I mean, it lingers on my mind as well. And it's something to do with the fact that it's so difficult to grasp fully when you're actually reading it. There's something unfathomed about it when you're reading it. And that's what that's why it's haunting. You keep sort of interrogating your memory of it. You know, year after year, you know, why, why did that happen? What's the ghost dimension for you? But what would be yours? Would you have one or? Well, I have a number of them. And I mean, it's a very different book. Kafka's The Trial. And when I'm reading it, I feel claustrophobic and I want to stop reading it. I want to get out of this. You know, I'm thinking, why am I reading this again? You know, but then it just niggles me. Well, I'm not sure if niggle is the right word. It does haunt me and it's got for years afterwards and I have to kind of look at it again to try and maybe kind of solve it or get on top of it and I can't. And maybe that's partly it. I mean, some books, they, they absolutely grip you but you can't get your head around them fully. You know, Wuthering Heights, The Trial is so different but I think they have that in common. And you feel that there's something they're worth going back for. Oh, there's something worth that you haven't quite figured out. There's a mystery and it's a profound mystery and that's what maybe that's a key ingredient. Of course you need all these other things, powerful characters, powerful emotions, but sometimes the very fact that there's a kind of unresolved experience in the reading means that it hangs in there. You know, like some kind of haunting melody in your head for the rest of your life. The rest of your life? Yeah, I know. And it's absolutely what I feel about, you know, Clara and the Sun earlier talking about what, for me, that generosity of you, the writer, leaving space for me, the reader, to bring myself to the book. And I think that is one of the key things that make certain books linger, that it is about the fact that the reader has a place. The book isn't quite finished until it's in the reader's hands. And when it's in the reader's hands, it becomes a unique piece of reading. And so we need to keep just, you know, keeping going at it until we get it. I think we're slightly undermining the profound way we're finishing this discussion, but when you suddenly brought in Clara and the Sun. I'm not sure if Clara and the Sun deserves to be up there with Wuthering Heights and Kafka's The Trial. But I think it's an important point we're making. You know, some books can become part of the emotional furniture of our lives thereafter, you know. And I don't quite know what makes some books do that and some books don't. Other books are just really enjoyable while you're reading them, you know. Well, I think actually that is the perfect place to stop because we're here on World Book Night celebrating reading and all the connections between readers and the ways that we share books and we borrow books from the libraries. And so I can't think of a better way to leave than a question from you to everybody engaging and listening tonight. You know, what do you think? Let us know. Let us know what you think about the books that linger. Let us know about the books that you're reading. So I said before, if you bought Clara and the Sun as part of your ticket, it will be winging its way to you now. If you haven't, you can buy a copy from the British Library online, bookshop, or of course you can borrow it from your local library or indeed any other friend who might have it, but if you do, you need to buy somebody else a copy because otherwise what will authors do? In the next hour, there's the World Book Night reading hour and the idea of this is precisely what we've been talking about which is that you share books, you talk about what you're reading. You could be reading with your family. There's a hashtag, you know, reading hour. So if you want to share what you're reading or just, you know, just say a book you like actually. No, I'm not sure quite how you're going to read and be tweeting at the same time, but you will be able to do it all of you out there. You will already have had a link to the second event that's going to happen at eight o'clock organised by the reading agency and that is the event books to make you smile that we've just been talking about. That's going to be hosted by Sandy Toxvig and there's a panel that includes David Nicholls, Waluw Babelayla, the WBN, which is World Book Night founder Jamie Bing and that will be just a celebration of the books that make them smile and hopefully some of you will join in. It remains for me apart from apologising for overrunning the time, of course, to give huge thanks to the British Library to Faber and Faber to the reading agency and of course to Kazaru Ishiguru. You have been a complete delight to talk to and I wish we could go on talking for much longer. If you want to know more about World Book Night, go to their website, which is www.worldbooknight.org or on social media, it's at worldbooknight. But from both of us now, I think it just remains to say, it doesn't matter what you're reading, just enjoy it. Do you want a final word? No, but just to say, it's been a real pleasure to talk to you, Kate and it's wonderful that so many people are listening and watching us. But I've really enjoyed our conversation. Me too. So it's from us too and from everybody at World Book Night, enjoy the rest of the evening and see you next year hopefully in the real world.