Glyn Maxwell
UK | 2006
Glyn Maxwell was born in Hertfordshire in 1962. Many of his plays have been staged in London and New York, and his poetry has won several awards, including the E.M. Forester Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Oberon also publishes his Plays One ( including The Lifeblood,Wolfpit and the Only Girl in the World) and the Forever Waltz . He lives in England.
Report 2006
You could publish a very fine anthology of Writerly Gratitude, so I’m not sure what I can say that hasn’t been said already. The Tower is of course grave and splendid – it strikes me as an ideal architectural shape for writing, with the necessities below, the sounds of life – the birds, the dogs – rising through lovely light spaces and shadows, up that narrower staircase that feels almost like a path in the brain, towards a sort of inescapable point. Sitting at the desk in the top room I felt both vitally isolated and yet spotlit by I don’t know what – the others who sat there, the spirits of the books, my past? as if it pointed there. Perhaps it’s no accident I got the most work done in the room below, where I had no stage-fright! but at the top I began a poem and completed a poem, both strong enough for the next book I think, and these have pointed the way onwards to more. I came to Donnini absorbed in my novel-rewrite and the play I meant to begin, but I left there truly revitalised as a poet… Meeting you, Beatrice, was a great pleasure as well as a great honour. I’m very glad to have been at your beautiful house in the Easter period, when so many kind and fascinating and convivial people passed through – though I imagine it’s always rather like that! I’ve never been able entirely to shut myself off and write – every day I like to swim in the stream of life in some form, even if only shyly observing – so it was wonderful to have good company. (And an honour to pour the wine for it!) With heartfelt thanks from the poet-playwright who writes novels,
Glyn