(The Booker Prize excludes writers from the United States but is not labelled ‘anti-American’. Most prizes exclude one or more categories of people. What do you think of the claim – made by AS Byatt, among others – that it’s a sexist prize? You also won the Orange Broadband Prize for fiction by women in 2008. That change only came six years later when my novel, Restoration, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was sold in 25 countries. I remember being very pleased that Claire Tomalin, who was one of the judges, described me as ‘an interesting and honourable writer’, but it didn’t change my fortunes.
RT: I understand, retrospectively, that there was quite a scramble among publishers to get their authors on this list, but I – who was living in rural Suffolk in 1983, had published only two books and knew very few people in literary London – was blithely unaware of it, so my inclusion came as a complete surprise. OB: Was it a surprise, or the realisation of a long-held ambition, to appear on the 1983 list?
Here she speaks to Ollie Brock about historical versus contemporary writing and exile – ‘freighted with possibility but also with a high degree of danger’. Rose Tremain was on Granta’s first Best of Young British Novelists list in 1983 – along with Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan.
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