MEET THE AUTHOR

Booker Prize-shortlisted author SIMON MAWER’s novel Ancestry tells the story of the lives of his ancestors

What did you know about your family history before you started researching the book?

I knew that we were from the East End of London, but not much more. In the book I refer to a family story that I had picked up when I was 15 or 16, which unfortunately is quite a time ago now. I found out that it was wrong, but it led to an interesting aspect of the story, although that’s not really the point of the book. The novel is about the strange borderline between fact and fiction that lies at the heart of any historical writing.

How closely did you stick to the facts you uncovered in writing the novel?

The facts are a framework, and I set myself the task of never stepping outside that framework. The documented information is all factual. But my ancestors being the sort of people that they were, they left very little behind them. In fact in the 19th century the majority were illiterate, so there are no letters or anything. There are very few artefacts – just traces, memories and family stories. I did get quite a few birth certificates, death certificates, marriage certificates, that sort of thing, so all that information is true.

There’s one thing in the book that is a fairly long story which made the newspapers, when my 4x great aunt was run over by a ginger-beer cart. That is actually factual – I quote that as fact. But everything else is filled in.

One birth record in my research was registered a couple of years after the death of the father that the birth is attributed to. You’ve got yourself a story, and you fill in the gaps.

If I was asked to give a figure off the top of my head I’d say that something like 75 per cent of the novel is fiction, and 25 per cent is fact.

What was it like imagining your own ancestors’ lives for the novel?

I was exercising the novelist’s skills completely, and that’s not unlike what somebody has to do when writing what they call nonfiction.

I mean, look at the number of books that’s churned out about the Tudors. Most of what you get is actually a sort of fiction. The information doesn’t clash with the known facts and it’s got to convince, but there’s an awful lot of fiction that goes into the writing. So you’re in an interesting borderline area, which fascinates me.

The action of writing Ancestry was not very different from any of the other novels that I’ve written, but there was the constant feeling that you’ve got to be fair to the characters, because these people were real.

One has to tread carefully as a writer – obviously not through any particular feeling of sensitivity towards them, but simply because you’ve got to do them justice. That’s sort of the feeling that I had.