Sam Thompson was born in London. His debut Communion Town [2012] was nominated for the Man Booker Prize in the year it was published. His son’s language difficulties inspired Sam to write his first novel for children Wolfstongue in 2021. The protagonist of the story is bullied at school because he does not speak. After helping an injured wolf, he is allowed to enter the hidden world of talking animals and realizes that here, too, language means power. Sam lives in Belfast, where he teaches English literature and creative writing at Queens University.
How many ideas for potential works do you have in your head?
More than I have time for, these days! When I was younger, I used to feel that ideas were a rare commodity and I didn't have enough -- but now I find there are plenty of ideas, and what's in short supply is the time to write them. I don't think I could count exactly how many notions for books or stories I have at the moment, because they exist in all kinds of forms, from detailed outline documents to a brief phrase scribbled in a notebook because it seems to contain a glimmer of potential.
When working on a new project, how do you sift through competing ideas in order to move forward?
In a way this question embraces the whole writing process, whether it's deciding which scribbled phrase in your notebook is the one you're going to try and develop into a story, or changing a single word to get a sentence to sound just right in a final draft. You're always choosing between competing ideas to find a route through the infinite field of possibilities. In the end you have to rely on your instincts to make those choices – but your instincts get better the more you read and the more you write.
What writing habit do you have that is impossible to shift? (That could be a particular snack, writing hours, location, caffeine consumption etc.)
Continual cups of tea; and I make a lot of use of the writing software Scrivener, along with notebooks and pencils. The only habit that really matters is to write regularly, and I try to keep a daily rhythm, though often enough I fail. Another useful habit is not to panic when you fail.
The international literature festival berlin (ilb) has become an essential part of Berlin’s literary calendar. What do you connect with the city?
I haven't visited Germany before, so I'm very excited to see Berlin and, I hope, try out the small amount of German I learned at school. Because I've never been to the city myself, my main associations with it are literary ones. I'm sure this is an obvious answer, especially for an English writer to give, but I love Christopher Isherwood's writing and especially his evocations of Berlin, so when I have the chance to explore the city I will no doubt be looking at it through his camera-lens. Samuel Beckett is another favourite writer of mine, and I'm very interested in the period in his life when he travelled around Germany absorbing all the German art and culture that he could. I hope to imitate him a little in that, too.
What impact did the Covid-19 pandemic have on your writing and ways of working?
A lasting one, I think. In my house we were very fortunate with the pandemic in that we did not get sick nor lose our jobs, but like many people we felt the effects in not being able to see vulnerable loved ones, and in the closing of the schools. We have three primary-age children and my main memory of lockdowns is of trying to help them through the anxiety of the time – I certainly didn't get any writing done. I suppose Covid brought home to me that writing is just another part of life, and seldom the most important part; but at the same time the pandemic made me freshly aware of how lucky we are if we can do the things, like writing, that give us hope and make us happy.
