In 1999, Andrew O’Hagan’s first novel, Our Fathers, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and the Whitbread First Novel award. Since then, O’Hagan has written two more impressive and celebrated novels. Personality was published in 2003 and for this novel he was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial prize. In 2006, O’Hagan published Be Near Me, which earned him the Los Angeles Times prize for fiction. In 2003 he was named one of 20 ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ by Granta magazine and, in 2006, he won the E.M Forster award.

As well as writing novels, O’Hagan is an accomplished essayist (the London Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books) and he’s a contributing editor to the London Review of Books and Granta magazine.

O’Hagan is one of the busiest and most successful writers in the U.K. and he’s also one of the kindest. Although he’s rehearsing a play - based on his novel Be Near Me, promoting his latest book, The Atlantic Ocean: an Essay (2008), and writing his next book, he agreed to do this interview and to take some considerable time to do it well.


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Kurt Vonnegut once published a list of rules for writing fiction. This is what he said:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things: reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

He also said, ‘The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.’

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