Graham Swift


Graham Colin Swift FRSL is a British writer. Born in London, UK, he was educated at Dulwich College, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York.

Career

Some of Swift's books have been filmed, including Waterland, Shuttlecock, Last Orders and Mothering Sunday. His novel Last Orders was joint-winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a controversial winner of the 1996 Booker Prize, owing to the many similarities in plot and structure to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.
The prize-winning Waterland is set in The Fens. A novel of landscape, history and family, it is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English literature syllabus in British schools. Writer Patrick McGrath asked Swift about the "feeling for magic" in Waterland during an interview. Swift responded that "The phrase everybody comes up with is magic realism, which I think has now become a little tired. But on the other hand there’s no doubt that English writers of my generation have been very much influenced by writers from outside who in one way or another have got this magical, surreal quality, such as Borges, Márquez, Grass, and that that has been stimulating. I think in general it’s been a good thing. Because we are, as ever, terribly parochial, self-absorbed and isolated, culturally, in this country. It’s about time we began to absorb things from outside."
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984.
Swift was acquainted with Ted Hughes and has himself published poetry, some of which is included in Making an Elephant: Writing from Within.

List of works

Novels

Waterland was adapted into a film of the same name in 1992. The film was directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal and starred Ethan Hawke, Jeremy Irons, and Sinéad Cusack.
Swift's novel Mothering Sunday was adapted into a film in 2021, starring Olivia Colman and Colin Firth and featuring Glenda Jackson.