Edited by Andrew O'Hagan and Colm Tóibín.
Picador, 2002

New writers, new writing, new books: here is writing that leaps into its own time, that crackles with now. Our cities, our love affairs, our voices, our familiar landscapes, are at once immediate and awry, recognisable yet unexpected. New Writing 11 showcases both new writers and selections from works in progress by well-known writers. This is an idiosyncratic and exhilarating collection.

Introduction

The street called after Picasso in Barcelona is a street full of trucks and traffic, with the Parc de la Ciutadella on one side and ordinary buildings on the other, some of them run-down. Passeig de Picasso is close to the port and close to the railway station. It has no obvious glamour; it is often deserted; it is never entirely safe. It is easy to imagine Picasso wandering around here, as indeed he must have done in the last years of the nineteenth century, delighted with it all, the dinginess, the shadows, the city noise, and ways of escape close by.

If he walked on the park side of the street, moving towards the railway station he would find a monument to himself, a tribute to him from the city of Barcelona done in the late 1980s, a work which does not appear much in guide books to the city or posters or postcards. It is a glass case and it is meant to have water running down the sides into a pool which surrounds it. But the glass is often broken and the water hardly ever works. This, too, might have delighted him, the local vandals and the local dust and leaves combining to destroy a public monument, adding to its strangeness and isolation and mystery.

It was designed by the Catalan artist Antoni Tapies. Inside the glass case is a huge old hall stand and some other furniture with metal girders running through everything. All is askew and shaken about. There are old sheets lying in the middle of everything and there are ropes. There is no logic, no clear meaning, no obvious reference to Picasso. There is something written on the sheets, but it is impossible to read. It could be a room after a bomb, but it could also be a room after a dream.

It is easy to stand back and read the monument once you are prepared to grant it its ambiguities. It is a monument to the imagination itself, to our ability to create images, to work from the nervous system, to create something which in its intensity and newness makes our experience in the world seem denser and more mysterious and harder to explain.

You can shut your eyes and imagine Picasso trying to get inside the glass box, move things around, add new colours and shapes. You watch him as he runs a yellow line down the glass, or you imagine Tapies as he conjured up this dream in a glass box, and you know that these gestures and plans come from the deepest and richest parts of the self, mixing instinct with skill, mixing dream with the concrete.

This collection of new writing allows thirty writers inside the glass box. None of them, we hope, can fully explain why certain, and indeed uncertain, themes or phrases or rhythms were chosen. They have nothing obvious in common, representing no groups or movements or nations or provinces, representing only the primacy of the imagination and the power of language.

Yet Joyce said that memory is imagination, and you may discover a habit in this year’s anthology, a habit for strong personal voices and irrepressible pasts. At any rate many of the poems and prose pieces take an interest in matters of place. This is an anthology of comings and goings, but a firmness of location may be evident in the language, even when, as so often, dislocatedness is more to the point. While the glass box is imagined territory, the railway station is real.

We invited some of these writers to contribute to this book. Others submitted work for which we are grateful. We wish to thank Sarah Hemmings of the British Council, and Maria Rejt and Peter Straus of Picador.

Contributors

Tiffany Atkinson, Patick Clinton, Jenny Diski, Isobel Dixon, Bill Duncan, Alistair Elliot, Anne Enright, Gloria Evans Davies, Michel Faber, Gerard Fanning, Charles Fernyhough, Maggie Graham, Lavinia Greenlaw, Georgina Hammick, Thomas Healy, Desmond Hogan, Mark Illis, Jamie Jackson, Panos Karnezis, Jackie Kay, Claire Keegan, Christina Koning, Nick Laird, Tim Liardet, Douglas Martin, Sean O'Reilly, Ruth Padel, Fiona Ritchie Walker, Jane Rogers, Mary-Kay Wilmers