There is a long tradition of expatriate writers - James Joyce in Trieste, James Baldwin in France, Muriel Spark in Italy; but I never expected to be, albeit in a very humble way, a part of it. I'm still surprised that life and work have led me to spend a good portion of each year in Boston. Although all my novels, save one, are set in Britain, they are mostly written at a desk three thousand miles away. This has its pleasures and its complications. I don't think that Robert Louis Stevenson, living on the island of Samoa and working on his last novel, The Weir of Hermiston, ever considered the people around him as potential readers. He was still listening to, and writing for, the voices of his Scottish youth, whereas my inner ear is divided between people for whom the word "pants" means underwear and those for whom it means trousers.
The ardour of the exile
10 August 2020
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