Tiny Interview #9 - Jeremy Cooper
Here we ask authors we admire to share their musings on art and writing, spill their current reading obsessions, and give us a tiny wedge into their creative life. In this Tiny Interview, meet British writer and historian Jeremy Cooper, whose novel Brian will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in May. Cooper also wrote the novels Bolt From the Blue (2021) and Ash Before Oak (2019), which won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Novel Prize.
‘Oak Tree,’ Henry Ward Ranger, 1895
Q: What book(s) are you reading right now?
A: My reading in recent years has been almost exclusively of contemporary fiction, two novels simultaneously, currently Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport and Xialou Guo’s first book, Village of Stone.
Q: What are your current writing projects?
A: The catalogue of European artists’ postcards for an exhibition at the Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett and the beginnings of a new novel.
A: All my published fiction and non-fiction is centred, one way or another, on the creative arts.
Q: Do any other art forms influence your writing? If so, how?
Q: Where is your favorite place to write, and do you have any writing rituals?
A: Though my life is lived in solitary routine, doing the same thing at the same times seven days a week, it is guided by no conscious rituals. I write at the desk in my study, with windows on three sides overlooking the West Somerset countryside.
Q: Who is a writer you wish more people were reading?
A: B.S.Johnson, any of his novels of the late 1960s and early 1970s, works of invention and emotion which challenge the status quo.
