Adam Foulds Writing Tips and Best Books by Young Authors

Adam Foulds won the award in 2008 for The Truth About These Strange Times

Adam's Writing Tips

1. Think only about the work, about writing a book as good as you can make it.  It helps to have the sensation that you are writing a book that doesn't exist and that you, as a reader, would like to exist. 

2. Surround yourself with kind and supportive people.  Be kind and supportive to yourself.  

3. Know your prerogatives as writer.  Here's a lovely sentence from A N Wilson's biography of Tolstoy to remind you:  'Tolstoy, like all true writers, carried his life about with him, created the very cocoon of observant detachment, indolence and sensuality in which a creative mind flourishes.'

(and 4. Once the work is done, look for an agent.  There are plenty of guides to doing that online.)

Adam's Best Books by Young Authors:

Literature, particularly fiction writing, is an activity that rarely produces prodigies.  It requires insights that come with time and that even the sharpest, most life-adapted minds can't truly grasp before they've been experienced.  Nevertheless, there is no shortage of masterpieces written by people younger than thirty-five.  Here's a list to inspire and intimidate:

1. A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare

2. Dubliners by James Joyce

3. Prufrock and Other Observations by T.S. Eliot

4. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

5. Everything that Keats ever wrote

Adam Foulds is a poet and novelist from London. He has been the recipient of a number of literary awards, including The Sunday Times Young Writer Of The Year, the Costa Poetry Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the South Bank Show Prize for Literature, the E. M. Forster Award, the Encore Award, and the European Union Prize For Literature.  His 2009 novel, The Quickening Maze, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.  He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2010.  He was named as one of Granta Magazine’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2013 and of the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets in 2014.  His latest novel, In The Wolf’s Mouth, was published by Jonathan Cape in February 2014.