I recently had the chance to sit down with Giles Foden, who is a creative writing professor here at the UEA. We discussed his career, as well as his most recent novel Thirst, in which young hydrologist Cat Brosnan searches Namibia for a hidden aquifer. 

What was your research and writing processes like for Thirst? Did you have a clear idea of what you wanted the novel to be from the start, or did it change as you were writing it? 

I was lucky to do a long trip through the Namibian desert a few years prior, for a piece for Condé Nast Traveller, so that was the first element of research. Later, as part of an interest in environmental narrative (which I was already working on in terms of academic grant links between LDC, ENV and DEV), I became hugely aware of the importance of water not just with respect to environmental studies but across many other disciplines too. The novel evolved as novels tend to, ie sporadically: it’s hard to think of novels as ‘research questions’ in a simple way, being more a question of opening up new areas of knowledge of which you do not know in process the essential parameters. This is because of the basic aleatory nature of language, which is both a curse and a boon, ie both a risk and an opportunity. 

That’s interesting to see novels in that way – are these processes similar for all of your writing? Have they changed over time? 

The period of research and composition is always different for each book. But there are coherences across time, too: in my case probably beginning with a location and also a political or sometimes scientific problem, into which moral problems were entwined, and then finding ways to address all that through the emblematic actions and viewpoints of different characters, and also through the broad structure of the story that emerges in formal terms. As writers at UEA, I and my colleagues in LDC are really lucky to be in an institution that prizes both creative thinking and cross-disciplinary fertilisation. In fact, those were the founding principles of the university back in the 60s (creative writing arriving soon later) and despite many current  headwinds those principles are still there. This institutional environment makes the whole process of writing easier than it perhaps is in other places. 

Yes, I agree, UEA really is a special place when it comes to writing, and we’re incredibly lucky to be in such a collaborative community of colleagues and students. Speaking of special places, what is it about Africa that you find so appealing to write about? What was it like to spend so much time there, and how has that influenced your writing? 

My Irish and English parents moved to central Africa in 1971, so as a young person I saw the immediate transition from the colonial to post-colonial conditions. I was lucky to get a postgraduate studentship at Cambridge (the Harper Wood award) which enabled me to travel around and do the research for what eventually became The Last King of Scotland. Afterwards, pursuing at first a career in journalism, I returned to the continent many times for assignments, which trips often produced books. That pattern to an extent continued when I entered academia in 2007, especially in those grant-winning moments when faculties combined their efforts to confront global challenges, all of which are determined to an extent by narrative (and also metaphorical) issues as well as practical or material ones. These experiences have influenced my writing in myriad ways, but I do think I am coming to the end of a cycle, having written variously about the colonial (Ladysmith), post-colonial (Last King, Zanzibar and Freight Dogs) and now the neo-colonial (Thirst) periods. 

Did you face any unexpected challenges in writing Thirst? 

Of course. In fact, I wrote another novel in between (Freight Dogs, which is about the Congo wars of 1996-2002). Mostly they were the challenges all writers face, ie trying to find time and also overcome the difficulties of reaching the right formal outcome. Probably I cut about 50,000 words from that book, more or less half another novel! 

Have you ever been inspired by students’ creative work during your time teaching Creative Writing at UEA? 

This happens all the time, at BA, MA and PhD level. I am never so happy as to be in a seminar room with brilliant young minds who always teach me how to see something I thought I knew about in a completely new light. Which often informs future research and writing. That electric moment of two-way learning is the best thing about being in a university. But none of it could exist without all sorts of ancillary structures, ones that are very costly, and it’s important for people like me (and students too) to remember that. I taught for a while at the University of Limerick in Ireland, where the Gaelic word ‘ollscoil’ is used. Broadly meaning ‘all school’, it’s a term I really like, referring not just to different schools, faculties etc, but also admissions, estates, student voice . . . all the things in fact which make a university possible. 

So, what would your advice be to budding writers? 

Simplify. 

Giles Foden’s Thirst is available now. Thank you to Giles Foden for the interview. 

Photo Credit: Giles Foden