Writing Copy Before Bestsellers - Six Famous Authors And The Advertising Campaigns They Created - The Booktopian Click here for titles from Fay Weldon Salman Rushdie The Man Booker Prize winner was responsible for coining the phrase Naughty But Nice for real-cream TV adverts, and came up with Irresistibubble as the catch phrase for Aero chocolate bars. Click here for titles from Salman Rushdie Ernest Hemingway The Nobel Prize-winning author appeared and wrote the copy for several ads for both Parker Pens and Ballantine Ale, for which he unsurprisingly received payment in both products. Click here for titles from Ernest Hemingway Dorothy L. Sayers The brilliant English crime writer and essayist coined the classic Guinness Is Good For You slogan, during her stint in advertising Click here for titles from Dorothy L. Sayers Brendan Behan Was also asked to think of a slogan for Guinness and took a crate of the famous dark ale as payment. The next morning he turned up with an empty crate and a small piece of paper that said, “Guinness: It Makes You Drunk”.

Click here for titles from Brendan Behan Bryce Courtenay Courtenay entered the advertising industry and, over a career spanning 34 years, was the Creative Director behind campaigns that included Louie the Fly, the original Milkybar Kid commercial and the Australian Labor Party’s 1972 election campaign, ‘It’s Time’.

Asian American Writers' Workshop - Six Things to Know About Salman Rushdie About Six Things to Know About Salman Rushdie Lesser known facts about the celebrated author—from his days sweating ad copy to his latest gig as a television screenwriter Salman Rushdie, left, playing Helen Hunt's gynecologist in the 2007 film Then She Found Me By AAWW May 3, 2013 | Amitava Kumar , fun facts , Jonathan Safran Foer , Lifetime Achievement Award , lists , Téa Obreht , trivia , Zadie Smith Media Gallery When, on February 14, 1989, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, sentencing the writer to death for “insulting” Islam with his novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie’s first reaction, which he recalls in his recently published memoir Joseph Anton, was to run to the window, close his curtains, and lock his front door. The author went into hiding for the following nine years. In the 656-page memoir, written in the third person, Rushdie reveals an enormous amount of detail about how exactly he survived his years in exile.

The sheer number of stories compelled us to dig up a few more. Here are a few things we learned about Rushdie’e life, from his early days before becoming a novelist to his latest, yet to be unveiled project. On Monday, May 6, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, Téa Obreht, and Amitava Kumar come together with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop to honor Salman Rushdie with a lifetime achievement award. For tickets and more information, click here . 1. Rushdie was once a champion of fresh cream cakes In the 1970s, after one of his theater pals in the UK landed a gig writing ad copy for lucrative shampoo commercials and used the money to buy a sports car, Salman Rushdie was compelled to try his hand as a copywriter. In a speech made before the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, he remembers being asked during his first copywriting test to “imagine that you met a Martian who mysteriously spoke English and you had to explain to them in less than 100 words how to make toast.” He failed the test.

Later, while working at the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather, he coined the slogan for Fresh Cream Cakes: “Naughty, but Nice.” A couple others lines he’s responsible for include “That’ll do nicely” for American Express and “Irresistibubble” for the effervescent candy-bar Aero. Although his stint in advertising came a full decade before he became a full-time author, Rushdie managed to write his Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children on the job. A mid-1980s TV ad for Fresh Cream Cakes, whose slogan Rushdie coined in the ’70s 2. He was off to see the wizard at an early age When Rushdie was 9 or 10 years old, he was inspired to write a short story after watching the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.

The story he crafted was about a boy in Bombay who climbs up a rainbow and has “fairy tale adventures.” In a 1992 New Yorker piece titled ‘Out of Kansas’ he writes that the song “‘Over the Rainbow’ is, or ought to be, the anthem of all the world’s migrants, all those who go in search of the place where ‘the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.’ It is a celebration of Escape, a grand paean to the uprooted self, a hymn—the hymn—to Elsewhere.” He calls The Wizard of Oz his “very first literary influence.” 3. Rushdie jumped at the chance to play himself on the big screen Well before he struck up a deal with Deepa Mehta to adapt Midnight’s Children to film, Rushdie had made his way onto the big screen a handful of times. He had a brief cameo in 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. His friend Helen Fielding, whose book was adapted into the British rom-com film, offered Rushdie the opportunity to play himself in the movie witnessing an awkward speech at the launch of a book titled Kafka’s Moterbike. He took the offer.

A few years later, he played Helen Hunt’s gynecologist in the 2007 film Then She Found Me. Rushdie had been interested in acting for years—he was involved in theater during his college years and then in London on the Fringe before he switched to copywriting. Spot Rushdie’s cameo performance in Bridget Jones’s Diary, during the book launch for Kafka’s Moterbike. One of Rushdie’s journals from his complete archive at Emory University | credit: Kay Hinton 4. His hard drive is now in the cloud Rushdie’s complete archive is housed at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, where his private journals, notebooks, photographs, manuscripts, a Mac desktop, three Mac laptops—one of which Rushdie spilled diet coke on—and an external hard drive are all open to view by the public. It’s one of the first interactive “born-digital” archives in the US, in which many of the materials being preserved originated in digital format. After the fatwa, Rushdie began working exclusively on computers, and so everything from virtual Post-it notes to early drafts of novels are only available digitally.

Viewers of the archive can even log-in to one of Rushdie’s computers and start editing a manuscript. 5. He’ll write you a book for your birthday—but only if you’re his son The stories in Rushdie’s magical realist children’s book Haroun and the Sea of Stories were first imagined at the bedside of his eldest son Zafar in the late 1980s, while Rushdie was writing The Satanic Verses. Zafar, then nine, had suggested that his father write stories for children, and so he turned the tales featuring a boy named Haroun, Zafar’s middle name, into a book written for his son upon his 11th birthday, and published soon after the fatwa was declared. Twenty years later, Rushdie’s younger son, Milan, demanded a book. And so for Milan’s 13th birthday, Rushdie followed suit and wrote the sequel to Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a novel featuring a boy with Milan’s middle name: Luka and the Fire of Life. 6. Rushdie’s got his eye on writing for the small screen Rushdie is now writing scripts for a Showtime sci-fi television series called The Next People.

He described it as a kind of “paranoid science-fiction series, people disappearing and being replaced by other people.” When talking about the move to TV scriptwriting, he told reporters, “In the movies the writer is just the servant, the employee… In television, the 60-minute series, The Wire and Mad Men and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.” AAWW Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie: review - Telegraph Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie: review AN Wilson on Salman Rushdie's memoir, 'Joseph Anton' Image 1 of 2 Salman Rushdie leaving Bruce Chatwin's memorial service, shortly after the fatwa was pronounced Photo: John Cogill In the third person: Salman Rushdie, whose memoir is 'Joseph Anton' Photo: Andrew Crowley By AN Wilson 5:00PM BST 21 Sep 2012 Even as this book appears, the Islamic world is once again in a fever of violence, with mobs being encouraged to take offence – this time at the making of some tenth-rate amateur film vilifying their Prophet.

Salman Rushdie is in a position to give us some interesting reflections on the extraordinary condition of the Islamic world, but clearly he needed to get this memoir off his chest first. It really is a most peculiar book, written like the works of Julius Caesar or General de Gaulle, in the third person. If this comparison seems grandiose to you, it would not necessarily do so to the author, who in the first 20 pages has compared himself to King Charles I – who, like Rushdie, did not acknowledge the legitimacy of the judges who condemned him – and Voltaire. At a Hampstead dinner party, held at the house of Michael Foot during Rushdie’s years of seclusion, he is introduced to John Mortimer, Neil Kinnock and Tony Harrison, who compares Rushdie’s plight with that of Socrates, Jesus Christ and Galileo. The title refers to the nom de guerre he adopted while in captivity, taken from the first names of Conrad and Chekhov. Alas, Rushdie possesses neither Conrad’s sense of moral irony, nor Chekhov’s gift of brevity. As the book galumphingly unfolds, the cast of characters becomes enormous.

Special Branch men, politicians and famous writers crowd its pages, yet very few of them come to life. One notable exception is Margaret Thatcher, met at a party, and her caressing of his forearm as she says, “Hello, dear, how are you getting along?”, does somehow convey what it was like to meet her. (It is followed by a diatribe against Thatcher for not doing more to get the Tehran government to lift the fatwa.) You would think that it was a sine qua non of any novelist that he should take an interest in human character, and yet, although Rushdie introduces himself, his parents and his four wives, he conveys very little sense of what any of them was like. His Indian parents sent him to Rugby School, whose chapel was designed by William Butterfield (not, as Rushdie says, Herbert Butterfield, who wrote the famous essay on The Whig Interpretation of History). At Cambridge, someone daubed his room at King’s College with onions and gravy; he does not explain why anyone would wish to carry out such a weird attack. He tells us that his parents did not bother to come to his graduation ceremony, pleading that they could not afford the flight from India.

(“This was untrue.”) Then he went on to work for an advertising agency and coined the slogan “Naughty but Nice”. After some initial struggles, the author wrote a few books and, relatively young, won the Booker Prize for an impressive novel, Midnight’s Children ; thereafter, his fame was assured. A son was born of the first marriage – Zafar – of whom the author is evidently fond, but a problem now occurred in his relationship with his wife, Clarissa. The arrival on the scene of a child, a rival to his woman’s love, destroys his relationship with the woman and he starts to sleep around. (The same thing was to happen in a later marriage, after the birth of his child Milan.) Related Articles Fay Weldon | Interesting Literature Interesting Literature Posted by interestingliterature Before he wrote Midnight’s Children – the 1981 novel which would win not only the Booker Prize for that year but the ‘Booker of Bookers’ award in 1993 – Salman Rushdie worked in advertising.

It was during this period in the 1970s that Rushdie came up with several classic advertising slogans: ‘Naughty but nice’ (to advertise cream cakes), ‘That’ll do nicely’ (for American Express credit cards), and ‘Irresistibubble’ (for Aero chocolate bars). He also came up with this, for the Daily Mirror: ‘Look into the Mirror tomorrow – you’ll like what you see.’ Rushdie has said that his work in advertising ‘taught me to write like a job. If you have the client coming in that afternoon for his new campaign, you can’t not have it. You have to have it. What’s more, it has to be good.’ George Orwell may have described advertising as ‘the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket’ in his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), a book which shows a man with high literary ambitions being ‘reduced’ to the work of writing advertising jingles and rhymes. But Marshall McLuhan described it as ‘the greatest art form of the twentieth century’. And certainly, many popular and celebrated writers of the twentieth century and beyond have put their mark on this modern art form.

Rushdie is one name among many. The author of The Satanic Verses had actually failed the initial test he took for J. Walter Thompson, a leading advertising company (which was run by none other than the thriller writer, James Patterson). But he persevered, spurred on by a friend’s assurance that it was ‘really easy’. Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising. – Mark Twain Fay Weldon, author of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), is another novelist who started out in the field of advertising. In this connection she is probably most famous for writing the slogan ‘Go to work on an egg’, in support of a large advertising campaign in Britain in the 1950s supported by the Egg Marketing Board. But Weldon didn’t in fact write the slogan: it was ‘hatched’ (sorry, we couldn’t resist) by someone else, and Weldon merely helped to popularise the slogan (we say ‘merely’, but at the time Weldon occupied the senior role of Head of Copywriting and she was instrumental in making the phrase known in households up and down the country).

One slogan which Weldon did write was ‘Vodka gets you drunker quicker.’ This was never used, though, as it was rejected by her bosses. (And this at a time before drink awareness was as high as it is now!) While we’re talking drink, it was Dorothy L. Sayers, crime writer and creator of the detective Lord Peter Wimsey, who originated several Guinness slogans used in the 1920s, such as (reputedly) ‘Guinness is good for you.’ (She used her experience working in advertising for the 1933 Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Murder Must Advertise.) One legend has it that the brewery had initially sought an endorsement from homegrown Irish talent, the playwright and well-known alcoholic, Brendan Behan, but the best he could come up with was ‘Guinness makes you drunk.’ (If only all ad campaigns were so honest!) However, this story is unverified and Guinness have denied that they ever sought a slogan from Behan. Advertising is the very essence of democracy. – Anton Chekhov Another writer to lend his services to the advertising industry was F.

Scott Fitzgerald, more famous as the author of The Great Gatsby and ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’. He wrote the slogan ‘We keep you clean in Muscatine’ for a local steam laundry company. Other writers who cut their teeth on advertising include Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, and Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22. If Marshall McLuhan was right and advertising is a great art form, then it raises the question of the relationship between literature and advertising. Can literary talent be honed by a spell working in the world of Mad Men? July | 2013 | Interesting Literature | Page 2 Interesting Literature Posted by interestingliterature Before he wrote Midnight’s Children – the 1981 novel which would win not only the Booker Prize for that year but the ‘Booker of Bookers’ award in 1993 – Salman Rushdie worked in advertising. It was during this period in the 1970s that Rushdie came up with several classic advertising slogans: ‘Naughty but nice’ (to advertise cream cakes), ‘That’ll do nicely’ (for American Express credit cards), and ‘Irresistibubble’ (for Aero chocolate bars).

He also came up with this, for the Daily Mirror: ‘Look into the Mirror tomorrow – you’ll like what you see.’ Rushdie has said that his work in advertising ‘taught me to write like a job. If you have the client coming in that afternoon for his new campaign, you can’t not have it. You have to have it. What’s more, it has to be good.’ George Orwell may have described advertising as ‘the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket’ in his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), a book which shows a man with high literary ambitions being ‘reduced’ to the work of writing advertising jingles and rhymes. But Marshall McLuhan described it as ‘the greatest art form of the twentieth century’. And certainly, many popular and celebrated writers of the twentieth century and beyond have put their mark on this modern art form. Rushdie is one name among many. The author of The Satanic Verses had actually failed the initial test he took for J. Walter Thompson, a leading advertising company (which was run by none other than the thriller writer, James Patterson). But he persevered, spurred on by a friend’s assurance that it was ‘really easy’.

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising. – Mark Twain Fay Weldon, author of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), is another novelist who started out in the field of advertising. In this connection she is probably most famous for writing the slogan ‘Go to work on an egg’, in support of a large advertising campaign in Britain in the 1950s supported by the Egg Marketing Board. But Weldon didn’t in fact write the slogan: it was ‘hatched’ (sorry, we couldn’t resist) by someone else, and Weldon merely helped to popularise the slogan (we say ‘merely’, but at the time Weldon occupied the senior role of Head of Copywriting and she was instrumental in making the phrase known in households up and down the country). One slogan which Weldon did write was ‘Vodka gets you drunker quicker.’ This was never used, though, as it was rejected by her bosses. (And this at a time before drink awareness was as high as it is now!) While we’re talking drink, it was Dorothy L.

Sayers, crime writer and creator of the detective Lord Peter Wimsey, who originated several Guinness slogans used in the 1920s, such as (reputedly) ‘Guinness is good for you.’ (She used her experience working in advertising for the 1933 Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Murder Must Advertise.) One legend has it that the brewery had initially sought an endorsement from homegrown Irish talent, the playwright and well-known alcoholic, Brendan Behan, but the best he could come up with was ‘Guinness makes you drunk.’ (If only all ad campaigns were so honest!) However, this story is unverified and Guinness have denied that they ever sought a slogan from Behan. Advertising is the very essence of democracy. – Anton Chekhov Another writer to lend his services to the advertising industry was F. Scott Fitzgerald, more famous as the author of The Great Gatsby and ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’. He wrote the slogan ‘We keep you clean in Muscatine’ for a local steam laundry company. Other writers who cut their teeth on advertising include Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, and Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22.

If Marshall McLuhan was right and advertising is a great art form, then it raises the question of the relationship between literature and advertising. Can literary talent be honed by a spell working in the world of Mad Men? Ch.42 Peter Carey (1943 - ) - OzLitGuide Ch.42 Peter Carey (1943 - ) Birth and education When Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh in 1943, his sister was eleven years old and his brother was ten. He attended the local State Primary School. Bacchus Marsh is situated not far west of Melbourne and, at the time, it had a population of between three and four thousand. However, the same street where the Carey family had a Car Dealership also ran past the home of the family of Frank Hardy whose novel Power Without Glory had caused quite a stir in Australia in 1950, [1] so the young Peter Carey would not have been unaware that to become a successful writer was an option for a boy from Bacchus Marsh. After finishing sixth grade, Carey was sent to Geelong Grammar School to do his secondary studies.

Geelong was only a fair-sized provincial town, but the Grammar School there is one of the most prestigious schools in Australia and was once the Alma Mater of Prince Charles, the heir to the English throne. After graduation from Geelong Grammar, Carey entered Monash University in Melbourne in 1961, intending to gain a B.A.Degree in science, but the promise he showed at first faded very quickly and, at the year-end examinations, he failed in all subjects; a fate he shared with Faulkner, a writer he much admired. In an interview with Ray Willbanks [2] , Carey denied that his failure was due to the fact that “academic life is so stuffy that it fails people who are creatively gifted.” Instead of such a high-sounding rationalization, Carey replied, “I had been seven years cooped up in an all-male boarding school. Then, suddenly, there were women and alcohol and I fell in love.

Then tragedy of all sorts descended on me and academic life seemed less important.” This explanation was repeated in an interview for a book of abstracts from Australian literature compiled by Geoffrey Dutton [3] , “I wrote poetry, drew a cartoon strip, got drunk a lot, fell in love, failed my exams, had a car accident and went to get a job. Advertising seemed an interesting thing to do. In short, I was ready to get my education. I got married in 1964 and stayed married until 1974.” Employment and education in the school of life Carey worked as an advertisement copy writer in Melbourne, a time he spoke about in an interview with Candida Baker [4] , “I was nineteen in 1962 and I started to get an education when I worked with people such as Barry Oakley ( Later to become Literary Editor for The Australian ) and Morris Lurie. I wrote copy for a year and a half before anything was accepted and I also claimed that I was writing a novel. Barry Oakley was very encouraging and used to give me his honest views of my writing.

I used to feel angry with him for his relentless criticism, but one day I showed him a short story ( It eventually went into the collection, The Fat Man in History ) and it was the first time he didn’t criticize me. He played a big part in my career – certainly in reining me in for a few years. Oakley told the same interviewer that he found it annoying that Carey was getting so good at writing advertising copy! The latter claims that Oakley experienced moral dilemmas about some of the advertisements he had to create, but Carey himself didn’t even know what a moral dilemma was! Actually, Oakley had been a school teacher and was over ten years older than Carey, so would naturally have been a good mentor for the younger Carey and he introduced the latter to a lot of good books. Carey told Lisa Meyer [5] that he read the books his co-workers were talking about. “I was reading Ulysses with an annotated index, Faulkner, Genet, Beckett, Kafka and Jack Kerouac. Literature arrived in this weird and very exciting way all at once, and it seemed that every book I read at that time changed my life, as it does, I think, when you begin to read.

I read in a big rush and I remember reading these authors and thinking of it as the first week of my life. I remember being struck by the beauty of the language, the rich, unimaginable poetry of these people whom you would look at from the outside and think were nothing. I loved the way they contradicted each other in their versions of reality.” To the question about what contemporary writers have impressed him, he mentioned Garcia Marquez’s, Love in the Time of Cholera. “Such a beautiful book, so imbued with a love of people. If somebody thought Oscar and Lucinda was anything like that, I would feel very flattered indeed.” The fledgling novel writer His first novel, Contracts, was published in part by the Jacaranda Press, but, on looking back, Carey says he is glad they only published such a small part of it. Between 1967 and 1970, he traveled extensively in Europe while based in London. During that time, he claims to have written four novels, none of which were published. It wasn’t until he had returned to Australia that his first book was published. It was a collection of short stories and titled The Fat Man in History.

He tells how, in 1973, he had gone through “all sorts of domestic and personal turmoil” which was a catalyst in his decision to accept a job offer from the Sydney firm, “ Grey Advertising.” He hadn’t wanted to leave Melbourne and was suspicious of Sydney, but his divorce from his first wife in 1974 seemed to call for a new start in his life. “I had come from life with a woman which had reached, for both of us, a state of chronic unhappiness.” [6] He rented a flat in Balmain, not because Balmain was regarded in Sydney as a place where writers “hang out”, but because it was affordable, near the center of the city and facing the waterfront of Sydney Harbour. Michael Wilding was a Balmain writer who lived up the road from Carey’s flat. Wilding had intended to publish an anthology of stories including some by Carey, but negotiations failed, so he mentioned Carey’s name to the Queensland University Press. They needed a book by a new author and that is how The Fat Man in History came to see the light of day. It was acclaimed by critics in Australia, England and the United States, so Carey’s career was launched.

In the interview with Lisa Meyer [7] , Carey said apropos of this book launching, “Ted Solotaroff published a really fine book and called one of the chapters Ten Years in the Cold. The central idea is that successful writers are only those who are able to survive the ten cold years it takes to learn the craft……. When I first got published, it was ten years almost to the day since I had begun writing. During those years I wrote four or five novels. The ad man becomes a full-time writer Carey worked hard in advertising in Sydney until he became part owner of the firm “McSpedden Carey.” He told Ray Willbanks [8] that he had been able to work part-time, living in the country and coming down to Sydney occasionally. However, by 1977 “living in the country” meant “ living in a hippie commune in Yandina, north of Brisbane.” While there, he wrote his second short story collection, War Crimes, and a lot of his first novel, Bliss. ( Harry, the hero in Bliss runs an advertising agency and eventually lives in a commune in a rain forest.) Willbanks asked Carey if he lived in the commune like “Harry” in Bliss.

He replied, “Yeah. People there said it was a community but it was thought by the local people to be a commune. I lived there for about four years and I would go to Sydney for five days a month, do some ads and come back to Yandina.” When Willbanks voiced his surprise that the commune allowed Carey to carry on his advertising work while remaining a member of the commune, Carey explained, “We were not very doctrinaire, so it was OK.” However, what troubled Carey more than his identity in the commune was the fact that he was combining his work as a writer with work in advertising. It may be of interest to mention here that Salman Rushdie, also a recipient of Britain’s Booker Prize ( 1981), had the same problem. He was a successful ad man ( e.g. He coined the phrase, Naughty but Nice, for a well-known brand of cream cakes! ) but he eventually felt obliged to abandon this lucrative business in order to be able to concentrate on his writing. [9] Carey admits that the braver thing to do would have been to get out of advertising altogether, but it gave him the financial security he needed for living.

Candida Baker [10] remarked, “You are one of the few writers of quality fiction in Australia who didn’t have to worry about money.” He replied, “Yes, that may be true. One would like to see an arts funding policy that made this possible for more writers. It is great not to need to worry if what you are writing sells or not.” Carey got out of advertising when his writing itself made him self-supporting, but he still maintains that his work in advertising was the best kind of patronage he could have had at the time he was launching his career, “Until now, I’ve never thought about financial success from writing and it is just as well, because I’ve been so riddled with anxiety about artistic matters that I would have hated to be worried also about whether my books were going to sell well or not.” Re-marriage and moving to the United States In 1984, Carey married his second wife, Alison Margaret Summers. Together they had two sons and lived in Sydney at first, where they pursued their respective jobs, working from their flat. Alison was a director of theater.

Lisa Meyer [11] questioned him, “You mentioned in another interview that your wife edits your work?” “Yes, it took a little time to sort things out. Here is a woman who works in a theater and who is a director, but is also brilliant with writers. I mean she really is good at this and what she has to say is always so smart, even though it can be upsetting, that I didn’t want not to have the benefit of it. Our present arrangement is that she writes notes and puts them in a drawer and, when I want to look at them, I open them up.” In 1989, Carey and his family moved to the United States where he taught creative writing at New York University and Princeton University. He still resides there but his being an expatriate hasn’t signaled the disappearance of the Australian writer. There have been five major works since his going to live in America and all of them have focused on Australian themes. However, like many modern people, he combines his love for his native country with a well-developed world outlook. Speaking to Lisa Meyer [12] about his book, Illywhacker, he says most nations are very self-deceiving in the way they tell stories about themselves.

“ We Australians pretend that we are very free and independent, but the level of our freedom depends on the length of the leash permitted to us by such countries as England and America.” Ray Willbanks [13] said, “In Bliss, you set up a positive/negative polarity between Australia and the U.S., with America standing for petrol, cancer, bad advertising and spiritual death; and Australia, through Honey Barbara standing for a kind of natural, romantic self-reliance.” Carey admitted, “I did have a thing about Australia being on the edge of the American Empire, which still seems essentially true.” (The Australia versus America idea is especially evident in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith and also in Illywhacker) However, although one can have reservations about American government and business policies, I really like American individuals. To me, they seem optimistic, whereas Australians tend to be pessimistic. I like talking to Americans better than to Australians. I think Americans are more comfortable with emotion than we are and I like that.” Carey’s working habits Asked whether he had a set pattern for working, he said to Candida Baker [14] , “I usually sit down in the morning and work until lunch time and I try always to type four pages.

By the time I have finished my morning’s work, I’m mentally exhausted. It is only when I’m revising and really know the material well that I can work all day.” His first claim to recognition was his collection of short stories, but he has gradually shifted to novel writing. He pointed out that you can get an idea for a short story and develop it, but, once you have finished it, you can’t move until you get another brilliant idea. However, with a novel, you only need one idea which then creates its own momentum and, to solve the problems that arise, you have to invent all sorts of situations. “Incredible situations have to be made credible” [15] is a statement that is very applicable in the case of Carey’s novels. Because he had no worries about financial security, he said that he would have been prepared to scrap two or three year’s work if the book didn’t turn out well. He actually thought this would be the case with Illywhacker which had taken three years to write. He said that it is only when somebody reads the finished work and likes it that the pressure and anxiety lift.

“Robert McCrum ( of Faber & Faber, London) read Illywhacker and told me that he liked it. Only then did I feel relieved.” [16] The Fat Man in History ( short stories ) 1974 War Crimes ( short stories ) 1979 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award Bliss 1981 Miles Franklin Award, New South Wales Premier’s Award, National Book Council Award Illywhacker 1985 Victoria Premier’s Award, National Book Council Award, Nomination for Booker Prize, Age Book of the Year Prize Oscar and Lucinda 1988 Booker Prize [17] The Tax Inspector 1991 The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith 1994 Age Book of the Year Prize A Letter to Our Son 1994 Jack Maggs 1997 Age Book of the Year Prize, Commonwealth Writer’s Prize The True History of the Kelly Gang 2000 Booker Prize, Commonwealth Writer’s Prize My Life as a Fake 2003 Wrong About Japan 2004 Review of Individual Works Short Story Collections: The Fat Man in History & War Crimes.

These collections were highly praised by critics at home and abroad and were the forerunners that launched Carey’s career as a writer. Most of them, with their elements of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and fantastical imagery, are surrealistic. Trying to fathom what the author is driving at is a mental exercise whose conclusions might easily differ from reader to reader, and deciphering their meaning is tantalizing. To illustrate the point, we could take the story Peeling, the author’s interpretation of which is available to us. Carey said that the story just follows his intuition when he used to visit a rather odd and arty house where a lady used to arrange dolls painted white on the landing. In the story, the doll-lady’s lover strips away the layers of her clothing, trying to get closer to her essence as a human being, but, eventually, she just falls to pieces. All there is at her center is a white doll. That is the end of the story. Carey points out that the mystery remains. She is externalizing this thing that is inside her, but there is no psychological explanation why.

He said that the story has many meanings and one of the things it is saying is that there was a mystery at the end and it was the mystery you saw in the first place. [18] It’s an anti-psychological view of character as something that can’t be touched. [19] For the most part, these are the kind of stories in the anthologies. Most of them are non-realistic with a tendency to surrealism, but there is depth in them that readers can’t help but recognize. Bliss 1981 ( Miles Franklin Award. N.S.W. Premier’s Literary Award. The National Book Council Award.) ( Carey calls it a love story ) Theresa Dovey, [20] who made a deep study of Bliss, draws attention to the narrator at the start saying of the lovable hero, Harry Joy, “He never thought of what he did as original. It wasn’t either…….

He was merely sewing together the bright patchwork of lives, legends, myths, beliefs and hearsay into a splendid cloak that gave a rich glow to all their lives.” Dovey goes on to say that “if the stories are not original in themselves, then it is in the process of telling them that the capacity of originality resides.” In the story itself, one of the characters says to Harry what he well might have said to Carey himself, “You were a good talker, Harry. That’s what made you. You know that? Not what you said, no……It was the damn way you said it.” Dovey uses the technical literary-criticism word fabulation to describe Carey’s style. Fabulation is akin to another style, magic realism [21] . These styles refer to the tendency to introduce fantastic events in narratives that, otherwise, maintain the reliable tone of objective realistic reporting. It involves also the fusion of the “everyday”, “fantastical” and “nightmarish” that blurs traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic.

[22] These devices allow authors to dispense with a lot of realistic detail in order to get immediately to the heart of what they want to portray. In Bliss, for instance, Harry climbs a tree at night to give himself space for thinking about his family. After various comic intervals, he falls from the tree and gets caught by the seat of his trousers on a branch, in such a way that he is held upside-down and can peep under the half-drawn blinds into the lighted rooms of his family home. In one room he glimpses his work partner philandering with his wife and, in another room he sees his fifteen-year-old daughter’s incestuous activity with her elder brother in payment for the drugs he can provide for her. The tragic and the comic are fused, but the effect is to drive home to the reader the plight of Harry and the reason why he curses his family and is regarded as insane for doing so. To Willbanks [23] , Carey said, “I liked the term magic realism when I first heard it and thought it was a good way to describe the sort of writing I used in Bliss and, especially, in Illywhacker.

Then later it became a tag that was thrown around so much that, in my mind, it became a sort of cliché. I became wary of being labeled a magic realist. In a funny way I feel that I am no longer writing in this way.” ( It is true that his writing came to rely less and less on this device, but it still remains evident in a lot of his books. However, even where it is used, it is dangerous to use it as an all-embracing label, because Carey has so many other talents as a writer that have nothing to do with fabulation or magic realism.) The novel is about an ad-man who suffers from heart seizure at the age of forty and experiences in his coma a feeling that he is on the brink of hell. He recovers and resolves that, from now on, goodness will be the aim of his life. He refuses lucrative advertising contracts if he regards the products as harmful for people. Candida Baker questioned him about sex in the story, [24] “Another thing about your books is that the sexual imagery in them, either realistic or fantastical, is very strong.” It seems that, for Carey, sex is as much a part of everyday life as breathing is.

One gets the impression that his outlook is completely post-modern [25] .Running through the whole novel are sexual scenes involving the characters and showing their goodness or lack of it. “At night the creakings of the house where they all lived were honeyed and erotic. There was a murmuring, a slow sensuous stirring as if the house itself still contained, in its dry timbers, the sap of sexual pleasure as it twisted stretching against its nails. Through the huon pine ceiling, came the moan of her fifteen-year-old daughter, soft as wool.” With his wife obviously in love with another man, Harry himself finds happiness in the arms of a hippie woman whose hatred of junk-food etc is relentless. With Harry, she finds the sexual satisfaction that has, until now, always eluded her, but she leaves him in a huff when she sees him gradually being caught up again in his money-making advertisement business, rather than joining her in a rain-forest enclave peopled by a commune of alternative-lifestyle nature lovers. Harry eventually extracts himself from the hell of his advertising world and joins his lover, Honey Barbara, in the rainforest.

There he finds a congenial life and, with Honey Barbara, he creates a family of five children and lives happily until he is killed by the falling bough of a eucalyptus tree that he had planted with his own hands. Behind this fantastical but spell-binding, highly amusing tale, there is an underlying spirit that indicates a polarity between the frantic pace of the modern business world which Carey somehow pins on America, and the more close-to-nature, congenial kind of life that Carey somehow locates in Australia. The ad-man finishing up in a hippie commune may seem to parallel the actual life history of Carey himself, but Carey himself was quick to inform Candida Baker [26] that “Harry’s journey through life doesn’t in any way resemble my own.” Illywhacker 1985 (“Age” Book of the Year Award) The novel is divided into three books, stretching over three generations and all narrated by Badgery, who also happens to be the 130-year-old hero ( liar and raconteur ) of the story. “ Lying is my specialty and I am often ashamed of what I have done.

My advice ( to the reader ) is not to waste your time by trying to pull apart the strands of lies and truth, but relax and enjoy the show.” Book I recounts his involvement with Phoebe, the daughter of a wealthy retired bullock driver. At her boarding school, she is known in the teacher’s room as “the little horror,”! but she changes and gets good grades after falling in love with Anette, a new teacher from abroad, who didn’t realize she had lesbian tendencies until she encountered Phoebe. When she graduates, Phoebe persuades her parents to employ Anette as a private coach for her further studies! Badgery arrives as the guest of Phoebe’s family because Phoebe’s father is caught up with Badgery’s idea of manufacturing aeroplanes in Victoria. Badgery also likes to show off his ability to deal with snakes and he keeps a deadly brown snake in a bag in his room. Phoebe conceals her attraction to him, but the vibes are unmistakable and, when Badgery climbs onto the roof to fix the spouting, he finds himself joined by Phoebe.

Rendezvous in a concealed enclave on the roof are repeated until the day Phoebe falls off the roof onto the lawn below. As she was naked, her mother suspects something might be going on between Badgery and Phoebe. Badgery realizes that marriage will be opposed by the father, so he is in a quandary. However, under cover of darkness, the father steals into Badgery’s room and, out of a feeling of kindness to dumb animals, releases the snake. He is found dead of snake-bite next morning in the kitchen. Fortune has smiled on Badgery and he weds Phoebe, and despite her efforts to abort her baby, Charles is born, angry with the world. The latter wants to fly Badgery’s plane but her plans are disrupted by the unwanted birth of her daughter. As soon as she recoups her strength, she deserts Badgery and the children and flies off with Anette. From that moment onwards, she is no longer a participator in the story. She has flown off into the sunset. Book 2. Badgery, left with two infant children, meets up with another woman, Leah.

The narrator ( Badgery) warns the readers,“No use at all in your skipping pages, racing ahead, hoping for a bit of hanky-panky. Leah is a married woman with a strong sense of right and wrong.” With Leah, Badgery goes on with life, raising the children, but his daughter becomes lost in the bush where, presumably, she dies. Charles, the remaining child, grows up with a preternatural way with animals and he regards Leah as his mother. When Leah divorces her freakish Jewish husband for his infidelity, she naturally finishes up with Badgery and remains with him until the end of the book. Book 3. Charles is called upon to rescue a school mistress, Emma. A goanna has run up her legs and body and is perched on her head ( an incident based on an actual happening known to Carey ). Charles rescues her and, as the story proceeds, marries her. He has a lot of trouble with her moods later on when he opens what he boasts will be a wonderful pet-shop. She eventually chooses to live in a big cage in the pet shop, a predilection also of some other members of the extended family.

The pet shop goes bankrupt when the secret American money investors withdraw their support, a not-surprising anticlimax (in this novel) to the spark of Australian enterprise that had hoped for the creation of “ the best pet shop in the world”. Charles shoots himself, not because of the business failure, but because he suspects Emma has been unfaithful to him. Her suspected partner in the affair was the goanna. Charles’s son Hisao, the representative of the 3rd generation, still depends on the advice of his grandfather for advice on how he should live. That is where the story ends. As I kept on reading all this hilarious nonsense ( 600 pages of smallish print ) faint echoes of two other authors made themselves heard to me; Furphy and Wodehouse. Furphy, because, in his day, “Tom Collins” was the current slang for a rumor monger. Illywhacker was Peter Carey’s version of Tom Collins. However, Tom’s stories sounded as if they may be based on reality. The Illywhacker’s stories were too “way-out” to give even the slightest impression of this.

Furphy’s novel was called “ Offensively Australian!” This one by Carey also comes under that category. He doesn’t want Australia, as a manufacturer, to play second fiddle to America, England and Japan. His native land should share the “uncompromising nature of its venomous brown snake!” The idea is followed up with the failure of the Australian pet-shop enterprise which Carey attributes to the perfidy of investors from USA. There were also faint echoes of Wodehouse, because the book is full of impossible situations which are solved “almost magically” very much as Wodehouse solves the problems of Bertie Worster. The books of Wodehouse have underlying romantic currents that subtly hint at sexually happy endings. Illywhacker explicitly describes them. As a reader, I asked myself how I could possibly have spent so much valuable time reading this book. I think the answer is that Carey is a master story-teller and we all love stories. The Da Vinci Code was totally lacking in humor and was presented so seriously that readers accepted it as fact. They were duped into this and can’t be blamed for continuing to read the book.

However, Illywhacker is so unashamedly false and “ over-the-top” that readers might kick themselves for wasting their time, reading it to the end, but once you start reading it, it is hard to put down. You let Carey carry you away and sit down “ to relax and enjoy the show”. Whatever judgments we make of the book, the critics evaluated it highly as a story and its author as a story-teller of note. Salman Rushdie | ShortList Magazine Films Salman Rushdie He’s faced down terror, written some of the 20th century’s seminal novels and took on Zuckerberg and won. ShortList’s Andrew Lowry meets Salman Rushdie It’s a strange experience, meeting Sir Salman Rushdie. If you were anywhere near a television set at any point in the Nineties, he was a semi-mythological figure – a crusader for free speech and fugitive from theocratic hitmen, more legend than man. But today, you walk into a plush London hotel room and there he is, with no frisking of me required and nary a Special Branch man in sight. It’s forgivable to fleetingly speculate what the bounty is on his head these days.

We’re here to talk about the impending film version of Rushdie’s landmark novel Midnight’s Children – the 1981 bestseller and two-time winner of the ‘Best Of Booker’ prize. However, it’s certainly not the easiest read. As I somehow find myself telling the acclaimed author, my mum couldn’t finish it. Fortunately, the 65-year-old author doesn’t bat an eyelid when I blurt out this fact. “It’s a long book – she should try another one,” he says with a smile. “I’m fortunate in that there are enough people who do like my stuff. It never occurred to me when I became a writer that my books would ever be popular – the idea that they would be international bestsellers didn’t occur to me. If you wanted to try to write a bestseller, you wouldn’t write Midnight’s Children. You’d write Twilight or something, and this, it’s fair to say, is not in that area.” Making a classic What area Midnight’s Children is in could be talked about all day. A sprawling, magical-realist allegory of India’s post-war history told by Saleem, a telepathic boy with a constantly dripping nose, it defies categorisation.

There’s everything in there, from political broadsides against Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi (who sued over a single sentence) to wacky comedy when a doctor examines a girl through a sheet. Now it’s been turned into a film, crucially an Indian-produced one. Although born in India, Rushdie spent his formative years in England, going to school and university there. “One of the reasons for writing the book,” he says, “was that I was living in Kentish Town and I worried that I was losing touch with India, that I was becoming detached from the country I was raised in, and I didn’t like the feeling of that. I wanted to do something that was a way of reclaiming it – to say that it still belonged to me. First I travelled in India for five months, just to renew my relationship with the place. And then I wrote the book.” Before Midnight’s Children, though, came an unlikely career in advertising. If Rushdie’s novels were forgotten tomorrow, he’d still be the man who coined the phrase “Naughty but nice” (to advertise cream cakes).

By night, he was scribbling away; first on a brace of unpublished novels (“I had a few crappy ones that never made it, thank God”), then a science-fiction novel, which was released to widespread indifference, and finally Midnight’s Children, which became one of the publishing phenomena of the Eighties. As you’d expect, Rushdie’s been intimately involved in adapting it for the screen. “This is the first of my books to be filmed and I would hate it if I was not involved,” he says. “If I just showed up at the premiere, saw it and thought, ‘Sh*t, I don’t like it’, that would be awful. So I thought, roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty and do the work.” He’s gone as far as narrating the film himself – although that took some persuading from director Deepa Mehta. “We did rationalise it – for the film to come out now, Saleem would be 65, so you couldn’t have his 30-year-old self narrating the film from a time when he was 65. Let’s imagine that the narrator is an older Saleem looking back on his life.

Even then, I didn’t imagine that it would be me doing it. I was very surprised when Deepa said she thought I should do it, and more than a little scared. But then again, I did always want to be an actor.” Courting controversy More books followed Midnight’s Children, as did more acclaim, but Rushdie’s fourth novel The Satanic Verses was, shall we say, controversial. Some Muslims were enraged by what they saw as the sacrilegious elements of the novel, which ranged from their misunderstanding of the title (a reference to the apocryphal story of the Prophet Muhammad supposedly being deceived into permitting polytheism) to the fact that Abraham is referred to as a “bastard”. Protests and bans swept the world. Some people supported Rushdie’s stand on freedom of speech grounds. Others were less supportive – including, bizarrely, Roald Dahl and Norman Tebbit, who called Rushdie an “outstanding villain”. “There was a period of about six months after the book was published when things were escalating,” Rushdie recalls. “It wasn’t about danger for a long time, it was an argument and I was trying to put my side.

The moment it began to change was 14 January, one month before the fatwa, when the book was burned in Bradford. I remember feeling physically sick at the sight of it – we all know the history of burning books. The fact that there were all these smug individuals standing around looking pleased with life while they were burning a book, that kind of disgusted me.” Come February 1989, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini heard of a protest against the book in Pakistan in which six people died. On Valentine’s Day, he issued the now-notorious fatwa (a religious ruling made by an Islamic scholar) that stated Rushdie was to be killed on sight. London bookshops were bombed and Rushdie’s colleagues were attacked. Under protection How did it feel to have someone saying he had to die because he’d written a story? “It was terrifying,” says Rushdie. “The worst moments were when my Japanese translator was murdered, my Italian translator was knifed and beaten, and my Norwegian publisher was shot in the back three times. In all those cases, the police concluded that these were professional hits – these were not just random crazy people, these were hired assassins.

Obviously I felt that these were proxy hits, that these were soft targets being hit instead of me, and I felt horrible.” Rushdie settled into life with round-the-clock protection from Special Branch, moving from safe house to safe house like a criminal, rather than a writer. Internationally notorious, he was even made a Bond-style villain in a Pakistani film named International Guerillas. And there were periodic reminders that this was no game: “Every so often I’d get taken to that James Bond building on the river, with Judi Dench inside, and I would receive intelligence debriefs on what they thought the situation was. “They often wouldn’t tell me how they knew things, but there were several times when they told me there were assassination squads in the country and various precautions had to be taken. And then I had to go back for a meeting 100 days later, and they used this phrase I’ll never forget – they said that an attack had been ‘frustrated’. I thought, ‘Frustrated? That’s a very strange word.’ I began to ask what they meant by it, then I just thought that it’s best not to ask.

Some things you don’t want to know.” By 1998, Khomeini was dead and the global situation had changed enough for Rushdie to come out of hiding, although the bodyguards stayed. The fatwa is still technically in place, figures in the Iranian regime still make threats and the bounty on his head runs to millions of dollars, but Rushdie today dismisses the threats as rhetoric, preferring to talk about his beloved Spurs – “Fifty-one years of hurt,” he grumbles, lamenting the last time the Lilywhites won the league title. These days, however, the biggest foe Rushdie faces isn’t global terrorism or even Arsenal, but Mark Zuckerberg. “On my passport it says Ahmed Salman Rushdie, and Facebook suddenly decided I should be called Ahmed Rushdie, which nobody in my life has ever called me – except my mother, when she was cross. I’m not on it that much, but in the end I got p*ssed off that they were trying to change my name, so – I’m quite proud of this – I decided to use one social network against the other.

I went on Twitter and said, ‘Look what f*cking Zuckerberg’s done,’ and within a couple of hours – boom – it was fixed.” And he seems genuinely chuffed. Facing off with the Ayatollahs and Facebook Let no one doubt the man has cojones… Midnight’s Children is at cinemas nationwide from 26 December (Image: Rex Features)

Question: Which Booker Prize winner coined the advertising slogan 'Naughty by nice'?
Answer: Salman Rushdie