Bookshelf Interview with Natasha Fairweather

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In April 2018 Nell met with literary agent Natasha Fairweather to speak about her five all-time favourite books. In the interview Natasha talks about how she got into publishing, what her job entails, and the best books she’s ever read. Natasha also revealed what she was currently reading, spoke about the recent TLS ‘Best British and Irish Novelists Today’ list, and offered her advice to aspiring publishers and writers. The interview gives a fascinating insight into Natasha’s professional and personal life, as well as providing us with a tantalizing reading list.

Natasha began her career as a literary agent in 1989 at Curtis Brown, going on to join AP Watt in 1999 after having lived and worked in Jerusalem and Moscow for seven years. She represents both novelists and nonfiction writers, including journalists, historians and politicians. Previously joint head of books at United Agents, Natasha is now a director at Rogers, Coleridge & White Literary Agency, which she joined in 2016. Natasha is currently living and working between London and New York.

NB: Tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a literary agent?

I did an English degree. I had no idea what I was going to do professionally, but I went mistakenly into advertising. Then, one day in the late 1980s, I watched a documentary about a famous literary agent called Pat Kavanagh, who was married to Julian Barnes. Pat was talking about how to construct the perfect commercial novel and how she made the first million pound book deal for a writer, who sadly died recently, called Sally Beauman. The book was called Destiny and I guess it was my destiny calling too. I’d never heard of a literary agent, but I thought to myself: this is such an interesting job; it’s both creative and there’s an element of deal making. I wrote Pat Kavanagh a letter saying: I’m miserably unhappy as an advertising executive and I’d love to be an agent, will you see me? Pat Kavanagh was very kind and helpful to me in my career, and that’s how I became an agent.

NB: What does being a literary agent entail?

You take on authors as clients and you manage their careers. The first thing is to discover writers who have talent and then find a way to marry that talent with the commercial demands of publishing, which is obviously a business, not an art form. So it’s a combination of trying to help writers to be as true to themselves artistically, while also finding a way to make a living out of it. It’s an amazing job; I still can’t believe I do it, because it’s a real privilege. You are usually a writer’s first reader, which is a great responsibility. Sometimes I compare the job to being a shrink, because you have to understand how people work and think, and over the course of many years working with someone you start to see their psychological obsessions playing out on the page repeatedly, it’s fascinating. But you’re also trying to make books commercially viable, so sometimes you also have to be brutal as well and say: no this isn’t good enough, go back and do it again; or no, this isn’t working, this one needs to be put in a drawer and never spoken of again - that is the very worst part of the job..

NB: It must be quite a delicate balance between the private relationship you develop with the author, and the very public book you are putting out to the world.

Yes, it is. Writing is a very lonely, insecure-making profession. The relationship you have with each of your authors is unique and, like all relationships, some of them are more turbulent than others.

NB: So we’ve asked you to choose your five favourite books of all time, and why. We’re wondering whether they were instrumental to different parts of your life, or if they’ve just had profound effects on you?

Book one: A Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett

It’s a big question! I’ve been really thinking about this. I came from a family of readers, but I was an incredibly hyperactive child and I just couldn’t sit still long enough to read when I was little; I was too busy building things and breaking them and running around. I really remember the first book that I escaped into, and couldn’t put down: A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It’s a delightful book, I love The Secret Garden too, but I think A Little Princess wins out. I’ve been trying to work out why… It’s a very English book because it’s about class, money and belonging. I grew up abroad and my mother was foreign, and she was quite dark and I think there was something about the exoticism of the little princess that appealed to me. It is also a story of inner nobility, which is such a tantalising fairy-tale: that eventually your goodness will be rewarded. I also just love the story of the Indian servant and the monkey coming across the roof and turning her garret into this glorious fantasy land where she was surrounded by beautiful things and delicious food. I have it as an audiobook, and when I can’t sleep or feel miserable, I listen to the last third of it. It’s a really beautiful story. Once I had read that, I thought: oh my goodness, I get it! The thing of escaping into a book, and it being a wholly satisfying experience.

NB: And where was it you were growing up abroad?

I went to Italy when I was six months old, and then we moved to France, Laos, Belgium and Greece in quick succession, so there were lots of different schools and education systems.

NB: So quite turbulent - did books become a constant?

I suppose so, but although the external family situation kept changing, we were a very tight family and I think of my childhood as a blissful one. It was just that I was temperamentally different to my sister who read voraciously from about the age of five, she was that kind of child.

NB: So how old were you when you read A Little Princess?

I really don’t remember - maybe eight or nine. I was probably reading below my age level.

Book two: A Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

I have been thinking about Joseph Conrad because of Maya Jasanoff’s biography, The Dawn Watch, which has just been published to such rave reviews. Although Heart of Darkness is one of the most controversial books in the cannon - because of its imperial white man’s perspective on Africa - it has an important place in my life. I went to an all girls’ boarding school, which had rather an anti-intellectual ethos I suppose. It was one of those 1970’s girls’ boarding schools; everyone had ponies, we did home economics...but anyway we were given Heart of Darkness to read and write an essay on. The cool girls in the class tried to create an insurrection against it (though not for reasons of political correctness), ‘it’s too difficult, it’s too boring, we don’t like this book, why do we have to read it’. I was probably thirteen at the time. I don’t have the essay I wrote anymore, and I doubt that I had much sensitivity at the time to issues of race and colonialisation, but I was blown away by the mythic power of the story and wrote an impassioned essay before I realised there was a boycott on doing the assignment properly. Most people wrote essays saying: ‘this book is unreadable and we shouldn’t have to read it’. But I wrote a proper essay, which I then had to read out to the class, and the English teacher said to me afterwards, ‘you really should think about studying English’. So it was a key moment - of glory and at the same time humiliation in the eyes of the cool girls.

Book 3: Middlemarch, George Eliot

Okay so for my third book I’ve really been dithering between Jane Austen and George Eliot, because I love them both so much. In the end I have chosen Middlemarch which I think is the greatest novel in the English language, or at least the greatest nineteenth century novel. It is panoramic in its range of interests from the personal to the political, money, class, medicine and of course, love. It examines how a woman defines herself, and tells the story of someone who is misguided in her youthful ideals and wants to dedicate her life to the service of a man whom she thinks is a genius, but who turns out to be cowardly, pedantic and even cruel. It’s an intensely feminist novel, even though it has, in Will Ladislaw, a romantic hero par excellence. Will is low-born, illegitimate, he’s been robbed of his inheritance, but he has an innate intelligence, and he’s sexy as hell! Middlemarch is an manual for how to live; and I try to observe its injunction to live freely and bravely.

I think it’s a very romantic book, but with a powerful message of social unconformity. George Eliot obviously lived that way herself, and I admire and respect her for that. But at the same time you have this wonderful story about money and its corrosive influence. You’ve got the old doctors and the people with new ideas trying to change English society, which was so class bound and driven by prejudice, but also enslaved to money. I don’t think you can read it often enough, it’s a brilliant book!

Book 4: Chekhov’s short stories, The Lady and The Lapdog

As I mentioned I’m partly foreign - my mother was half Greek, half Russian and my father was English and Irish. I really wanted to include a Russian writer because I lived in Russia in the nineties, struggled to learn Russian, and read Russian literature intensely. It is hard to chose one writer because I love them all - Turgenev and Tolstoy in particular - but actually the writer I think I admire most is Chekhov. Chekhov’s short stories would be my 4th choice. My absolute favourite Chekhov story is called The Lady and The Lap Dog it’s one of his great ones, it begins in Yalta, which is where he lived just before he died, so in the Crimea. It’s a beautiful story about a love affair between two people who are struggling to find meaning or purpose in life.

This is showing off, but he’s the only writer I can still read in Russian because he wrote in simple, distilled language. He’s got an impressive social conscience. There’s a political meaning to everything he writes. In England we know him more for his plays, which are also brilliant. He’s incredibly witty and astute, just three or four pages can tell you a story that you tumble headlong into.

NB: Do you find you get more from reading Russian writing that’s written in Russian, rather than translated into English?

My mother was an interpreter and spoke seven languages and she was also a translator so she talked about this a lot. She would read things in English and in Russian, in French and in English. You always lose something in translation, but you also gain something in translation. When I read in Russian, for instance, I will lose a lot, because I’ll be reading it like a ten year old, instead of reading it like a fifty year old. It’s lovely to read in both languages.

Book 5: A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry

Okay so now I’m a literary agent and I work with contemporary literature and I really wanted something that was contemporary. I think the greatest novel...I mean I’ve worked on lots of amazing books, but I can’t choose one of my own because that would be invidious...I think the greatest novel that’s been written in the last twenty-five years is by Rohinton Mistry, it’s called A Fine Balance. Rohinton Mistry is a Canadian citizen of Indian origin and he’s only written two novels and a collection of stories in his life and we await his new novel with baited breath. He is acknowledged to be a genius I think. A Fine Balance is set in 1975 during the time of the emergency laws when Indira Gandhi was running India. It’s a story of two Chamaars, lower caste tanners. Mistry is a combination of Dickens and Tolstoy, in my view. He writes with incredible humanity, even though he puts his characters through appalling trials, you feel his love for them, to a degree which which is rare in modern writers.

Again, the book is about politics and social injustice and the strivings of the human soul. In a secular world where I don’t have somebody preaching values to me, I think the writing that I respond to helps to show you the way, to make you a better person, to understand. I love books that throw you into a completely different culture.

NB: Are you reading anything at the moment?

Yes, I’m currently living in New York so I’m trying to read a lot of American stuff. I’ve just read a book by a very promising young author, Lisa Halliday, which is called Asymmetry. It’s her first novel and it’s an extraordinarily astute and nuanced piece of work.

We’re living in a great era for women writers - there has perhaps never been a more responsive time to publish if you’re a woman writer - so though I did not plan to be reading only women writers at the moment, it is perhaps not a coincidence. The next book is a memoir by Tara Westover called Educated. Westover grew up in a crazy, violent, Mormon, survivalist family and she got herself to Cambridge. It’s a story of her escape from her childhood. It’s a very powerful book.

The third thing I’m currently reading is by an English writer of my generation, she’s called Rachel Cusk. I’ve not always loved Rachel Cusk’s writing in the past, but I’m very much enjoying Transit, which is part of a trilogy, and is a really fine novel about a break up of a marriage and starting again.

NB: We saw that TLS recently included six of Rogers, Coleridge & White writers in their best British and Irish authors list, and we were just wondering what makes these authors so exciting, and why they are exciting to you?

Okay, well I’ll talk about my author in that group who is an Irish writer called Sebastian Barry. Sebastian started as a playwright, and fiction has taken over his life. There’s a moment in a writer’s life - sometimes it happens early, sometimes late, and sometimes bang in the middle of life - Sebastian is sixty-two so I suppose it’s happening more or less in the middle of his life, where you just hit your stride. His most recent novel, which is called Days Without End, has won several prizes, and now he’s the Irish Laureate. Sebastian is a good example of what makes Irish writing so great - a kind of hyper-articulacy; he writes like a poet, so it’s highly lyrical, highly scented, flavoured writing, but with a rollicking plot as well.

Days Without End is a story of a boy whose family dies in the famine, who gets on the boat to America and is drawn into the Indian wars and the civil war, but also into a love affair with a young man; so it’s a gay novel. The battle scenes are described much more than the love scenes. What's so great about it is that Sebastian doesn’t make a big deal about the fact that they create this new type of family, so it’s both a historical novel, and yet it’s highly topical because it’s about this new way of being, of someone who has to completely reinvent themselves because everything they have known has been destroyed in the famine. It’s very short as well, you can read it in one sitting if you want to.

It is hard to generalise about the rest of the RCW writers on that list: Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Enright, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín and Nicola Barker. They’re all completely different kinds of writers and at different stages in their careers. Zadie’s probably the youngest, she’s forty. The only thing you can say is that the agents at RCW have consistently looked for real writers with long term prospects and weathered the difficult times in their careers and I guess the TLS list is a vindication of that strategy..

NB: Do you have any advice to give people of our generation who want to go into the book world, be that writing or publishing?

Publishing is a profession which gives its rewards quite late because it’s badly paid at the beginning and you have to do endless internships to get a job. However, it is worth the struggle - since work becomes an ongoing education and the people in the profession are fascinating and well-meaning. That said, we need different kinds of people to come into it. Everyone in publishing recognises that it is insufficiently diverse - too white and middle class. So I would encourage anyone to go into publishing, you don’t need to have a fancy degree, as long as you love reading, and you respond to writing in the right way, I think that’s the main thing.

In terms of writing, as a young writer you just have to find your voice, which is such a cliché, but there is no getting around that. Find a way to tell the stories that interest you, whether they’re fiction or nonfiction, in a way that is authentically yours. I think the main thing is to sit down and write every day. And read a lot and think about the world and how you want to express your vision of it. You can write about anything, literally anything, no subject is unacceptable, and in a way the more diverse and unusual your take on the world is the more receptive the world will be. So just get up every morning and sit down at your desk and write!