The Costa Prize? I’m flabbergasted that I won it
was very much a product of her times. That’s not to excuse it. It’s an ongoing debate. For example, I won’t read Kingsley Amis because he was modern and post-Holocaust. Somehow his antisemitism offends me more.”
Segal has been immersed in literature since she was a tiny child. She thinks this has less to do with being the child of a famous writer and much more to do with being raised in a household in which literature was exalted. Books were almost the defining feature of her childhood. “My father being famous? I had absolutely no idea about that. But his being a Francesca Segal discusses love and marriage in the suburbs at Jewish Book Week, on Sunday February 24. The nine-day international literary festival, billed as London’s biggest, starts on February 23. Highlights this year include discussions with historian Simon Schama and former Foreign Secretary David Miliband, and sessions featuring Howard Jacobson and A B Yehoshua. For full details, visit writer was important to me because I was a nice Jewish girl who worshipped her daddy. I wanted to do what he did. When he read me bedtime stories it would often be poems for adults but with cadences and language that children would enjoy. My father was a classicist and that, even more than the fact that he wrote novels, informed the atmosphere in our house. Etymology was for him important enough that he would leave the dinner table to find something, read it and explain it.”
Francesca’s world was books. Because her sister is nine years younger than her, she was for a long time an only child. So she would spend most of her time reading. She recalls reading as she walked down the street to school, her mother guiding her in the right direction.
She always assumed that she would grow up to be a novelist but that ambition led to a terrible anxiety. What if she wrote a novel and it was rejected?
“There was this Jewish neurosis. If no one publishes the book then I have to train as something else. All I ever wanted to be was a writer. It is who I am in the secret life in my head. To put myself out there and be told that I was not good enough would be a negation not just of what I wanted to be, but also of who I thought I was.
“Of course there was also the good fantasy. Not about winning awards, which I never contemplated, but about having my novel published — with a jacket — by a real publisher.”
In the event she need not have worried. Segal already had an agent, who sent the manuscript out to publishers. There was an auction for the rights both here and in the United States, where sales have been going very well. And the television rights have been snapped up by the production company which makes Downton Abbey.
Nonetheless, when she was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award, she confesses to being “flabbergasted. Once I was on the shortlist, the prospect of winning was there. But even then I was surprised when I did win because it was such a great list.”
Segal describes the moment when she discovered she had won the award. “I was away in Thailand with my husband. It was to be announced on Front Row on Radio 4. So there we were crouching outside a cafe at 2am trying to get wifi, being eaten alive by mosquitos, and listening to the presenter, Mark Lawson, make the announcement. And I won.
“Suddenly the mosquitoes didn’t seem to matter anymore.” The Innocents is published by Vintage at £7.99