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Punk poet Patti Smith first met Robert Mapplethorpe when she moved to New York in the late 60s, and the pair became inseparable. Now she has written a memoir of their time together, from hanging out with Ginsberg and Warhol to her rise as a hit singer and his career as a photographer. She talks to Gaby Wood, and we publish an extract from her book, Just Kids

At the Robert Miller Gallery in New York, a place that has long provided a home for her association with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith – poet, punk rocker, painter and urban hero of long standing – has erected a museum of memory. A poster from 1978 advertises a joint show here of their work: Mapplethorpe’s photographs of Smith, and Smith’s drawings of Mapplethorpe. She gazes out, a dark-haired wizard caught mid-motion, blurred, against a wall of gauzy white fabric. He is a lightly sketched satyr with forking beard, a Greek demigod by way of Henri Michaux. “Bob Miller Gallery presents Patti Smith,” Smith’s scrawl reads around the edges of her own drawing, “requesting the presence of Robert Mapplethorpe.”

Mapplethorpe died of complications related to Aids in 1989, and Smith has, in a sense, been requesting his presence ever since. Elsewhere in the gallery, her old Corona typewriter spews a sheet of paper headed “Reflecting Robert”; a letter she wrote to him in March 2008 lies under glass, near a marble crucifix and his monogrammed velvet slippers, size 8½ M. She has reprinted as platinum prints beautiful photographs she took of his hands when they were both 21 (Smith is now 63); when he was satisfied with his work, she explained when she first exhibited these, Mapplethorpe would stand back from it and put his hands in his pockets with his thumbs sticking out. These are portraits of a moment in an artist’s mind, details of a person known with great love and specificity.

“I’m not a Catholic, but I have a relic sensibility,” Smith says of this display when I speak to her on the phone. (The retrieved objects are just a few elements of what she refers to as “my monastic mess”.) Though she lives in New York, she is in San Francisco just now, for a reading from her latest book, Just Kids, a memoir about her first years in New York with Mapplethorpe.

They met in 1967; she arrived in New York from New Jersey, a 20-year-old who had just given up a child for adoption, and found him sleeping in an apartment where she thought friends of hers lived. (Her friends had left.) The pair were fated to meet again, repeatedly, and eventually they became inseparable. Smith writes about Mapplethorpe almost as if she were inside his head, evoking the plays of light that captivated his eyes, the work he did as he went along. “I did feel I could enter him and he me,” she agrees, “and I still feel that.” They recognised something in each other; they had, as she writes, “never been strangers”.

In the late 60s and early 70s, Smith and Mapplethorpe worked feverishly into the night side by side, held toss-ups between grilled cheese sandwiches and art supplies. She nursed him through purgatory, when he had trench mouth and gonorrhoea and they were living in a cheap hotel where the corridors were filled with junkies. They were lovers at first, and when Mapplethorpe finally “answered nature’s call”, as Smith describes his homosexuality, they still “had something very precious to save”.

They hung out with Allen Ginsberg and Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol and Sam Shepard. This was in the days when Mapplethorpe didn’t have the patience to take pictures, before he became “smitten” with photography; when Smith had no idea she would one day front a rock’n'roll band. They were, as she neatly puts it, “in a fresh state of transformation”, about to become the artists they would go on to be. “Patti, you got famous before me,” he said a decade later, when they walked down the street and heard her hit record “Because the Night” blaring from storefronts.

“He was teasing me,” Smith tells me now, “because I always told him I didn’t care if I was famous, I just wanted him to be famous. But Robert wanted people to see me as he saw me – it didn’t matter so much to me whether the world saw me or not, but it was very important for Robert that the world acknowledge me. He believed in me.”

It has taken Smith 10 years to write the book. Initially, after Mapplethorpe died, she wrote instead of weeping, and came up with a series of linked prose poems in his honour, entitled The Coral Sea. But his death was succeeded by the death of Smith’s pianist, Richard Sohl, at the age of 37, the death of her husband, the guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, and the death of her brother, Todd, all in the space of a few years, and though she’d promised Mapplethorpe on his death bed that she would one day write their story, she couldn’t return to the first loss in the midst of the others. “Robert was the first great death in a series of great deaths,” she says, “and it almost taught me how to grieve. Although you grieve differently for each person, the important part of grieving is to live.”

There was a long while, after she got married, moved to Detroit and had two children, when Smith was out of the public eye. After her husband died in 1994, she moved back to New York. She wasn’t fantastically well off financially, but her fans and friends pulled together: her lawyer got her kids a place in a hot-shot progressive private school; Michael Stipe found them a house; Ann Demeulemeester gave her clothes, Bob Dylan asked her to perform with him. She began to rebuild her life; she made a comeback.

Smith is working more strongly now than ever. She’s working on another non-fiction book – “It’s funny,” she says, “I never thought of doing another book like the book I did for Robert, but I seem to have found a voice in this book that wants to keep talking” – and on a detective story. She continues to take photographs, and she is two thirds of the way through work on a new album. She’s composing with her daughter, Jesse Paris, and collaborating with her son Jackson, a guitarist who is married to Meg White of the White Stripes. She has expanded her band to include, for instance, a group of gypsies she met in the hills in Italy, and continues to play with her longtime guitarist Lenny Kaye. The album will be, as she puts it, “a feast of family and friends”, and Smith is “ecstatic” to be doing so much work at the age of 63.

New York City, of course, is expensive now and not the same; Smith can’t help mourning the death of bohemia. But she wants to make one thing clear: she always has faith in the new guard. “I think that each generation has to do things their way,” she explains. “I don’t think my lot was any better or any cooler than the present time. My daughter now is 22, about the same age I was when I went to the Chelsea hotel with Robert, and I wish for her all the magic and all the possibilities I had. They’re the future,” she adds of Jesse’s generation. “I’m certainly not the future. I was the future when I was younger. Now I’m happy to be the present.”

Martin Amis goes back to first principles, with impressive results, says Tim Adams

For at least the past decade Martin Amis has seemed intent on making the most distinctive comic voice in contemporary British fiction – his own – do the most unlikely things. He’s put it in the mouths of historical tyrants and 9/11 plotters, he tried it out for size – for laughs – as an impotent monarch and – in earnest – as a survivor of Soviet purges. He’s had a go at Americans called Russia and women called He and one of the problems with all these characters is that they have sounded too smart, too Mart. The first thing to say about Amis’s 12th novel, The Pregnant Widow, then, is that it is a great relief to find him back as a Keith.

The moniker might be a nod to Keith Talent, the antihero of Amis’s last wholly successful novel, London Fields, but Keith is a homecoming for Amis in more than this sense. Keith Nearing is the most proximate a fictional alter ego he’s written since Charles Highway in The Rachel Papers. This Keith is nearing 21 (his birthday, when our tale begins, is days away), he’s nearing normal male height, like the author, “in that much ­disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven”, and he’s inching toward a statuesque 20-year-old blonde named Sheherazade, with whom he is sharing a fabled summer in an Italian castle, along with several friends (including his ­semi-platonic and semi-liberated girlfriend, Lily).

Amis starts with a typically arch ­disclaimer, the suggestion that his tale – like the murder story in London Fields – is another “gift from real life”. ­”Everything that follows is true,” he drawls, blowing smoke at the reader. “The castle is true. The girls are all true, and the boys are all true. Not even the names have been changed. Why bother? To protect the innocent? There were no innocent…” He has said elsewhere that the novel is “blindingly autobiographical” and, though names obviously have been changed, you half believe him.

We’re mostly in 1970, at the moment when Amis himself started to find his voice. Few writers have ever been more conscious of ageing – like all prodigies he seemed totally undone by the creeping knowledge that even his dazzle would die – and having looked back on his lost youth first as crisis (in The Information), then as hard-won wisdom (in the memoir Experience), Amis finally, at 60, gives it a go as what it no doubt mostly was: romantic farce. The Pregnant Widow reminds you of those medieval epics in which the hero, Troilus, or ­whoever, observes from a heavenly vantage, free from earthly care, his teenage self ­tortured and dying for love, and permits himself more than a wry smile.

The version of his youth that Amis gives us here is a fleshed-out reincarnation of the narcissist he described briefly in Experience, “short-arseing along the King’s Road” in green velvet flares, sending letters to Kingsley that concluded “Kafka is a fucking fool” or “Middlemarch is fucking good”. “Aren’t they nice, the young?” Keith’s older self observes, here: “They have stayed up for two years drinking instant coffee together, and now they are opinionated – they have opinions….”

In the castle Keith is cramming Eng Lit compulsively. He’s ­force-feeding Richardson and Fielding, fast-forwarding Austen and George Eliot, each novel seeming to him a dramatisation of the interminable sexual frustrations he is experiencing around the castle’s pool. Keith is a trier, and a dreamer (he’s also, of course, a list-maker, an aphorism-coiner, and an italiciser); like Amis, he has swallowed Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary whole and punctuates even his chat-up lines with lessons in linguistics. He is viewed by the author with amused and sometimes poignant affection (”Nostalgia, from Gk nostos ‘return home’ + algos ‘pain’ ‘the return-home-pain of twenty years old’.”) The portentous note that has sometimes been Amis’s fatal flaw is mostly played here for comedy.

Consciously inhabiting the past, particularly this skewed slice of his own past, seems to liberate his writing from unwitting self-parody. He (and the reader) are spared the awkwardness of the last “big” novel, Yellow Dog, which seemed to be formed of a ­desperation to continue to accommodate what John Self once called (when Amis was really on the money) “the real stuff, the only stuff… the present, the panting present”. Looking back he knows every contour of the territory, the sex, the politics, the pretensions, and most of all the language. By ­framing his recollections in the present – it’s not Keith that is speaking, we eventually learn, it’s his grown-up conscience, the Jiminy Cricket of 2009 looking back on the Pinocchio of 1970 – he finds he can have it all ways.

The result is a flashy Decameron of the sexual revolution; 20-year-old Keith may want to believe that his present moment – the Pill, female emancipation in the bedroom – has been plotted just for him, but a part of him can’t help fearing he is on the wrong side of the barricades (”the Me Decade was the Me Decade, right enough – a new intensity of self-absorption. But the Me decade was also and unquestionably the She Decade…”). Women – in particular the women Keith observes in torturous peripheral vision plunging in and out of the castle’s pool, topless (and occasionally bottomless) – are undoubtedly more available in theory, but not, strictly, in his experience, in practice. Keith is doomed and hamstrung in his pursuit of Sheherazade not only by his legion of neuroses, and a vestige of old-fashioned loyalty to Lily, but also by rival suitors – an absent (and very tall) Pentecostalist, and an ever-present (and very short) Italian count. Love, in 1970, appears to have been replaced by “hysterical sex” and of course “hysterical sex means never having to say you’re sorry”.

Tragically and despite all of his historical advantages, it appears Keith’s own strike rate as a result won’t improve on Samuel Richardson’s Lovelace in Clarissa (”one fuck in 2,000 pages,” he notes glumly), and predictably this is the source of much bathetic torment, delivered with all Amis’s mastery of register and tone. Unusually for Amis, Keith’s deferred gratification also injects into the novel that other, often elusive, 18th-century quality, suspense (”Amis novel” and “page-turner” have not always been synonymous). There are other surprises, in comparison with recent Amis, too: fully realised female characters – Lily, in particular, Keith’s almost cynical ­girlfriend, is shown torn between having it all and having nothing at all; and walk-ons who are not just one-liners (Adriano, the diminutive count, is a ­virtuoso ­performance).

For the most part Amis stays within the limits of this comedy of manners; when he is finally tempted to stray beyond it in the latter third of the book, with the introduction of the girl Keith eventually does get, and regret, his substitute Sheherazade, Gloria Beautyman, the plotting creaks just slightly. Beautyman spins Keith seductive yarns about her age, and her religion, truths that are unveiled in an ending that strains for universal significance. This intervention can be forgiven, though, in some vintage Amis peacockery: riffs on the earthiness of Italian plumbing and the obviousness of Italian men, on Montaigne and Northanger Abbey, and fresh updates on such familiar refrains as hangovers (”The air itself was about to throw up. And he could hear the yellow birds in their tree – pissing themselves laughing…”) or the evolutionary insistence of winged insects, those “armoured survivalists with gas-mask faces”.

For a long while, it has been hard to imagine how a writer much concerned with reputation would begin to fashion for himself a convincing late period to match his stellar youth. This novel looks a lot like one answer to that. Amis has, of late, become a professor of creative writing at Manchester University and you could even begin to imagine that his position has prompted a satisfying return to first principles. Lesson number one: always write what you know.

Reclusive author of the 20th-century classic The Catcher in the Rye, whose hero Holden Caulfield spoke for rebellious youth

JD Salinger, who has died aged 91, was the reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye (1951), one of the most beloved novels in the English language since the second world war. Millions of American high school and college students identified passionately with the novel’s 16-year-old hero, Holden Caulfield, whose blend of innocence and disillusion make him appear a version of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, translated from the American heartland to New York City, and from the simplicity of the 1840s to the anxieties of the modern era.

Yet, although Holden is an American, his appeal transcended national borders. The Catcher in the Rye has been translated into 30 languages, and sold more than 65m copies worldwide. In his biography of Salinger, the British poet and critic Ian Hamilton wrote of his shock of recognition when, at the age of 17, he read Holden’s story. Other non-American male critics have expressed a similar sense of wonder about how Salinger could have so perfectly captured their sense of their own adolescent selves.

Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City. After elementary grades at state schools, his parents sent him to McBurney, a private school in the city, for secondary education. At best an indifferent student, he was expelled from McBurney after two years for failing to apply himself. At 16 he was dispatched to Valley Forge military academy, Pennsylvania, graduating two years later.

He then returned home. In 1932 his parents had moved to an apartment on Park Avenue, in the heart of Wasp gentility. Salinger’s father, Sol, made his living as an importer of luxury foodstuffs from Europe. His mother, Marie Jillich, is described by biographers as deriving from Scots-Irish stock, and is reported to have changed her name to Miriam because of pressure from Sol’s Jewish family. The secret of her background was so closely guarded that it was only after Salinger’s barmitzvah at 14 that he learned that his mother was not Jewish.

After Valley Forge, Salinger enrolled in New York University but lasted only a year. At this point, his father gave the young man money so he could spend time in Europe improving his language skills and learning about food imports. Salinger stayed abroad for five months, mainly in Vienna. During that time he showed as little interest in Polish hams and fancy cheeses as he had in his schooling. And from letters of his that have since been uncovered, it is apparent that he was taking little notice of the political events that were about to convulse central Europe. Indeed, he may have left Vienna only a month or so before the German annexation of Austria in March 1938.

Back from Europe, Salinger enrolled at Ursinus college, a Pennsylvania institution that disseminated the doctrines of the German Reformed Church. After one unhappy term, he returned to New York and completed his misadventures in higher education with a night course at Columbia University. This turned out to be especially important for him, because it was taught by Whit Burnett, the highly regarded editor of Story, a magazine that specialised in publishing short fiction. Burnett also had a solid record for discovering new talent. Encouraged by Burnett, Salinger began publishing his work in high-paying “slick” magazines such as Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post, as well as in Story. By the time he was 21, he had already had a story accepted by Esquire and had come close to it at the New Yorker, where he most wanted to appear.

Just as Salinger’s career was taking off, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and he was drafted into the army. From 1942 to early 1944 he had an easy war, moving around army bases in the US, but in March 1944 he was shipped out to Tiverton, Devon, where his unit was to prepare for the Normandy invasion. During the time between his arrival in Britain and D-day, Salinger completed six chapters of a novel about a character very much like his own teenage self. Even before 1944 he had decided on a name for his hero: Holden Caulfield. Later he explained, half-humorously, that he chose it because it brought together two Hollywood film stars, William Holden and Joan Caulfield. When The Catcher in the Rye appeared, it marked the culmination of a decade of living with and thinking about his creation.

Salinger was a counter-intelligence officer in the 4th Infantry Division, but he did not escape the carnage of the liberation of Europe. He saw considerable combat, including the Battle of the Bulge. During much of this time he continued to write. To judge by letters and short stories he wrote at about this time, the experience of war had a traumatic effect on him. Salinger had already shown his emotional vulnerability as an unhappy schoolboy, and in his later fiction he would emphasise the emotional precariousness of his youthful heroes. Two early Salinger stories, later reprinted in his collection Nine Stories (1953), offer glimpses of men suffering from what we nowadays call post-traumatic stress disorder. A Perfect Day for Bananafish and For Esmé – With Love and Squalor depict soldiers who have survived but with badly frayed nerves.

Salinger himself suffered a nervous breakdown and was briefly hospitalised when the war ended. In late 1945 he met a German woman named Sylvia, who may have been some kind of doctor, possibly a psychologist. They married a few weeks after meeting. In her memoir Dream Catcher (2000), the novelist’s daughter from his second marriage, Margaret Salinger, wrote that Sylvia was a low-level official in the Nazi party whom her father, working in counter-intelligence, met when he was sent to arrest her. Later, Salinger’s second wife, Claire, said that her husband had told her that Sylvia was a passionate, evil woman who hated Jews with the same venom that he felt towards Nazis. This intense, physical relationship burned itself out after eight months.

In 1946 Salinger returned to New York. Still emotionally shaken, he tried to resume life as a writer. In 1948 he had three stories accepted by the New Yorker and never submitted his work to the “slicks” again after that, his name becoming indissolubly linked with that of the New Yorker. He also set about turning his Holden Caulfield sketches into a work that would be longer and more ambitious than anything he had attempted before.

When The Catcher in the Rye first appeared, most reviewers were positive, but several attacked the book as subversive and immoral. One reviewer, who found Holden “vulgar” and “repellent”, feared that “a book like this, given wide circulation, may multiply his kind”. Indeed, many protectors of public morals contrived to get it banned from schools and libraries. More recent criticism has emphasised Holden’s inchoate desire for something purer and truer than the cruelty and “phoniness” of the unredeemed world. The notion that The Catcher in the Rye is an immoral and irreligious work has largely given way to the antithetical view – that Salinger’s chief impulse is specifically religious. Sympathetic readers have actually regarded Holden as a saint, albeit of an unconventional kind, and have seen the plot as an exercise in the spiritual picaresque.

After The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger’s rate of production slowed considerably. He was now reading Zen and Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism, and Advaita Vedanta, and putting in long hours of meditation. He took up a macrobiotic diet and had acupuncture and homeopathy. Nine Stories appeared in 1953, but many of them had originally come out in the 1940s.

Then, in 1955, Salinger published Franny in the New Yorker. It was the first of his stories in which the religious impulse is explicit. Although, at 40 pages, Franny was much slighter than The Catcher in the Rye, it became as much of a young people’s classic in its moment, and all the more the object of a cult because it was hard to get hold of until it was reprinted in 1961, in Franny and Zooey. That volume quickly shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Its publication marked the high point of Salinger’s popularity, creating far more excitement than the publication of The Catcher in the Rye had 10 years earlier. Salinger’s image appeared on the cover of Time magazine and the merit of his fiction was widely debated. The period from 1955 to 1963 in America was the time of rebellious youth as apolitical loner, and Salinger was the laureate of this diversely unhappy cohort.

His three major subsequent stories – all novellas, and longer and more diffuse than the tightly crafted pieces in Nine Stories – were Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1955), Zooey (1957) and Seymour: An Introduction (1959). All are about members of the Glass family; the parents, who were once stars of vaudeville, and their seven children, all of them precocious to a fault. Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam found an appreciative audience among Salinger’s younger readers. But by 1960 his work had come to the attention of influential critics and academics, and for the most part they were not as appreciative. Salinger, who had always been extremely sensitive of critical opinion, was badly wounded by attacks on his work by John Updike, Mary McCarthy and Frank Kermode.

In 1965, Salinger published Hapworth 16, 1924, a novella that took up 80 pages in the New Yorker. It was very negatively received, and his response was to quit writing or, as he claimed, to continue writing but to refuse to have anything to do with publishers or the commercial literary scene. On his 34th birthday he moved into a modest hilltop house Cornish, New Hampshire. It was far enough from New York City to make a point.

Salinger had turned to eastern religious meditation in a serious way and largely withdrawn from the world. From this point on, the great drama in his life and work consisted of his battle to frustrate journalists and would-be groupies, whose interest in his life had been whetted by what seemed to them – not without reason – the autobiographical element in his fiction.

Here was a writer who had a deep distrust of the world and of the flesh, but one who periodically became enmeshed in both. In 1955, when Salinger was 36, he met and married a 19-year-old Harvard undergraduate, Claire Douglas, daughter of the distinguished art critic Robert Langton Douglas. The eccentric eastern religious regime that he imposed on his household, and his exclusive concentration on his work, meant that the marriage was rocky from the start. Yet it was the longest relationship Salinger sustained, and it produced two children, Margaret, born in 1955, and Matthew, in 1960. In 1967, however, close to a nervous breakdown herself, Claire filed for divorce. She won the house in a settlement, but Salinger built a new one for himself only a mile away so he could continue to see the children.

Salinger entered into a series of relationships with very young women. One of these was Joyce Maynard, an 18-year-old Yale fresher who attracted attention in 1972 when her essay An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life appeared in the New York Times. Salinger wrote Maynard a fan letter, a correspondence ensued, and in 1973 she left Yale to move in with the writer. Their relationship lasted almost a year. In 1998, in a memoir entitled At Home in the World, Maynard recalled the period as one in which she had been emotionally abused and finally cast off with indifference. Her intimate revelations certainly did not please Salinger, who regarded Maynard’s book as a betrayal.

But this was as nothing compared to its sequel the next year, when Maynard auctioned the letters Salinger had sent her during their relationship. In 1986 his lawyers had been able to prevent the publication of the original version of Hamilton’s biography when a court ruled that his quotation of excerpts from unpublished letters violated the author’s rights. But this time Maynard was the undisputed owner of the letters Salinger had sent her, and she was not proposing to publish them. In the event, the American inventor of a hugely profitable computer anti-virus software programme came forward and bought the letters – promptly making them over to Salinger as a gift. In June last year, Salinger launched a legal action against the author, publisher and distributor of a proposed “sequel” to The Catcher in the Rye. Yet his victories were often pyrrhic, attracting more publicity precisely because of his reclusiveness.

Salinger is survived by his third wife, Colleen O’Neill, whom he married in the late 1980s, along with his son, daughter and three grandsons.

Jerome David Salinger, writer, born 1 January 1919; died 27 January 2010

Mark Krupnick died in 2003

Andrea Levy interviewed by Gary Younge

When Small Island was published five years ago it started out faring much the same as Andrea Levy’s first three books: well reviewed but not particularly widely read. “Give me a basket and I’ll go door to door with it,” she joked to the publishers. The book “wasn’t really selling. It certainly wasn’t doing anything fantastic.”

It was a mark of the enduring quality of the first three – Every Light in the House Burnin’, Never Far From Nowhere and Fruit of the Lemon – that none had gone out of print. It was perhaps a mark of their limitations that she had not managed to sell a single one abroad. “Middle aged and middle list,” she points out. “It’s bloody tough out there in that position. They were giving up.”

But then came the prizes. First there was the Orange. Even then, she says, Small Island only got a halfway decent bump in Britain, and no one abroad was interested. Then, in fairly quick succession, came the Whitbread, the Commonwealth and the Orange Best of the Best, as well as being shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle award in the United States, Romantic Novelist of the Year and two National Book awards in this country. The novel – about four Jamaicans who emigrate to Britain during the Second World War – broke through, in a very big way indeed. Translated into 22 languages, from Vietnamese to Macedonian, it became a bestseller both in the UK and Canada and was chosen as the Big Read in Hull, Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow.

“I’m still reeling from the success of it,” she says. “I’m still wondering what it was all about. It got sanctioned as part of the canon. Once I won the Whitbread I could see that it was going beyond what I ever thought was possible. Older white men interested in RAF gunners were buying it and reading it and enjoying it – the kind of people who’d never bought my books before. I wonder whether it was because we’d just gone through this massive period of immigration from eastern Europe and maybe there was safety in looking back at that part of our immigration history with some nostalgia.”

Either way the success gave her the space, time and resources to pursue her literary interests more freely. A couple of years ago she joked that she was retiring: she settled into a rhythm of doing the household chores – paying bills, shopping, etc – in the morning and then writing in the afternoon.

“Well, my retirement is from striving,” she explains. “Thanks to Small Island, I don’t have to pay the mortgage anymore. There’s not a day goes by that I’m not grateful I’m in that position. This girl who had ’shop girl’ written right the way through her. ‘Shop girl,’” she repeats, and acts out writing the words on her forehead. “Now I can explore what I’m passionate about.”

Small Island signalled a significant shift in scale and scope from her three earlier works, which were strong, engaging novels drawn from her immediate life experience and with a familiar cast of characters. Each was set, for the most part, in north London, with a working-class, black family whose parents had emigrated from Jamaica. Each family had at least one daughter who aspired to higher education and at least one sibling who did not. The parents, meanwhile, were more interested in keeping their heads above water than in issues of race, racism and class inequality.

Levy calls these books her “baton race”. “I’m a writer learning my craft and gaining in confidence or not,” she explains. “So that was the person who I was. Then you write the next one. Anyone reading my books could say, ‘Well, she got a dictionary there,’ and ‘She got a thesaurus at this point.’”

She can tell you, almost to the day, when she was injected with the creative adrenaline that produced Small ­Island – it was 1997, and she was judging the Orange prize.

“I suddenly understood what fiction was for,” she says. “I had to read books that I wouldn’t have necessarily read. I had to read them well and I had to read them in a short space of time. Back to back. Annie Proulx and ­Margaret ­Atwood and Beryl Bainbridge and Anne Michaels – boom, boom, boom. And I started to realise what fiction could be. And I thought, wow! You can be ambitious, you can take on the world – you really can.”

Her ambitions took her further and further away in time and place from her own beginnings. Small Island roamed from London to the Midlands to Jamaica and was set during the ­wartime years. Her latest book, The Long Song, is set on a Jamaican slave plantation, Amity, in the early 19th century in a period up to emancipation. It tells the story of a slave girl, July, and the love, envy, intrigue and spirit of playful insubordination, as well as the political resistance and personal rivalries that surround and consume her – an everyday tale of ­ordinary plantation folk a continent and several generations away from where she started out.

While invitations to parties and literary events have been more plentiful in recent years, she has been less likely to accept them. “Something got put to bed with Small Island,” she says. “Running to stand still, wanting to be part of that literary thing – all that has left me. I could quite happily not have anything to do with that world now.”

Descriptions of her as “angry” (she once said “fuckers” in an interview) or “worthy” are ham-fisted attempts to force racial stereotypes on her that simply do not fit. In person she is both irreverent and somewhat shy. There’s an endearing anxiety about her and, because success came fairly late in her career – she was 48 when Small Island appeared – she has remained largely unaffected by her recent renown. When she was close to finishing the novel she woke up one night in a sweat fearing she might lose it. She already kept three copies in her handbag, as well as the one on her computer and the one hidden in her car in case the house burned down. But what, she fretted, if the house caught fire and a spark took the car with it? The next morning she made another copy and sent it to a friend.

“If I go away I send a copy of my work to my agent asking him not to look at it but, should I not return, please to publish it posthumously,” she says. “I am forever convinced that I am never going to get to the end of a book, or that I’m going to lose it. I am an extremely cautious person.”

When Levy’s mother, Amy, was going to marry her father, Winston, in Jamaica, her father’s family hired a detective to make sure there was nothing untoward in her family history. Middle-class, light-skinned Jamaicans – Amy was a trained teacher, Winston a book-keeper with Tate & Lyle – they arrived in Britain in the late 40s to discover that none of the privileges they had inherited counted for much in Britain. Her mother’s teaching qualifications were not accepted here, so she took in sewing while she retrained. Her father worked for the post office.

Raised on a predominantly white council estate in Highbury, north London, Levy was inculcated with a sense of class rooted more in cultural behaviour than in resources. “I thought we were middle class because we had three meals a day,” she says.

Whatever conscious racial identity she had while growing up seems to have been remarkable more in terms of what was to be avoided than what was to be embraced. “I was not at all curious about Jamaica as a child,” she says. “We were told, not in so many words, to be ashamed of it.” She only discovered that her father came over on the Empire Windrush, when it was shown on television and her dad casually mentioned it while he was ironing.

The London she was raised in was not the multicultural city it is now. “We didn’t know that many black people,” she says. “There was another black family at my church. But I just used to feel terribly sorry for them because I knew how difficult it was, and we would never have spoken. I’m not proud of who I was then. But I was just dealing with things as they came.”

It was only when she went to art college that she encountered the social confidence and material resources of Britain’s middle classes. It would be some time before she started to locate herself within the country’s racial hierarchies – during the 80s, when London prided itself on equal opportunities, and she was working in the voluntary sector. During a racial awareness workshop her office was asked to divide into black and white, so she went with the whites.

“And everybody said, ‘No, no, you should be on the other side,’ and it was a bloody shock. I thought black people were doing something somewhere else that I wasn’t a part of. I felt embarrassed to go to their side. Not ashamed. I just thought, ‘I don’t know anything about being black’ – I was inauthentic. I was a political person – a left-leaning person; I thought I’d got my politics sussed. And suddenly this thing came along, and I had to learn about it.”

When did she work it out? “Any day now,” she says, laughing. “I’m still learning.”

She points to a boxed set of Who Do You Think You Are?, the BBC TV series in which well-known Britons trace their ancestry, and says, “They’d never have me on because I’m not a big enough celebrity, but I love it. People can go back generations, but they’ve only done about three black people and they can only take them back so far and then the door shuts, because all that’s there are ledgers. Nothing else – just a big mass of nothing. I know my ancestors were slaves, but what did they do? How did they live? How did they manage to survive it? We know so little and very little of what we do know comes from them. The only way you can go any further is through fiction.”

This was the curiosity that produced The Long Song, in which July tells her story, urged on by her son. Levy says she was inspired to write the book after a young black woman at a conference on the legacy of slavery rose to ask how she could have pride in her ancestry when all her ancestors had been slaves. “I thought, ‘Wow, how could anyone have any shame or ambivalence at having slave ancestry?” She wanted to see if she could change this woman’s mind and make her proud of her ancestry.

“When you try to imagine slavery in terms of what happened it’s almost unthinkable,” she says. “But people got through it. Not every day was: ‘Got up, got whipped thoroughly, saw someone hung from a tree’. So I try to give a sense of the daily life – the drinking milk and eating yam of it – as well as the lives of the planter class. I try to give people their humanity.”

But she is acutely aware of how the subject matter itself could overpower her literary efforts. When Small Island failed to make the Booker longlist, one of the judges explained that the book was “worthy”, but that the acclaim “comes from the topic rather than the treatment . . . People feel guilty about not thinking about our colonial past.”

This is not the world that Levy wants to take on The Long Song, and she did not begin with the intention of writing a book set during the time of slavery. She wants her books to be read, she explains, but many people, for different reasons, prefer not to engage with that aspect of their past.

She talks about slavery as though it is a live wire in the public imagination. When people touch it there is a short-circuit; either they think they know all about it, they don’t want to know about it or they think that it’s not a topic worth knowing about.

“There are a lot of people who are open to talking about it,” she says. “But there are many who will say that it was a very long time ago, and a lot who just don’t want you to mention it because it will make them feel bad. It’s painful, both for black and white people. But it’s 300 years. You can’t just ignore it. I don’t want people to feel guilty. I don’t want them to pick it up and feel like they’re taking vitamins.”

The novel was intended to cover a much longer period of time, she says. “I was intending to get out of there very quick. But you can’t avoid slavery. You can’t. You have to go to that place. You keep banging into it. I’m not proselytising. It’s the book I had to write because of who I am.”

Apple launches the iPad, its 9.7in colour screen tablet, which aims to rob Kindle of growing ebook market and be hottest gadget in technology history

The veil was finally lifted on one of the most hotly anticipated gadgets in technology history tonight as Apple’s Steve Jobs held aloft the iPad, a tablet-shaped computer which he hopes will win Apple domination of the ebook market.

Looking like an oversized iPhone, and sporting a 9.7in colour screen – the same size as Amazon’s black-and-white Kindle ereader – the iPad would “open the floodgates” for the sales of ebooks, said Jobs, Apple’s chief executive.

In front of an excited crowd, he showed off web surfing, email, games, presentation software and various other tricks. But it was clear ebooks are, at least initially, Apple’s highest priority for the touchscreen iPad, as Jobs unveiled a program called iBooks to let people “discover and purchase and download” ebooks directly on to the device from iTunes.

The company has signed deals with five major publishers – HarperCollins, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hachette – to sell ebooks on the iPad.

Reaction online was mixed, but the publishing industry – keen for a digital salvation in a form that does not obliterate its profits – was generally effusive, as were voices from the education sector.

The iPad would help “attract millions of new readers to the world’s best books”, said John Makinson, chairman of the Penguin Group.

If the iPad ousts the Kindle, currently dominant in ereading, it would mark the third business that Apple has set its sights on conquering. It first took on digital music with the iPod, and more recently has been overhauling larger incumbents such as Microsoft in the smartphone sector with its three-year-old iPhone.

Speaking at the launch in San Francisco, Jobs suggested it would be “far better” at tasks such as web browsing, email and reading ebooks than either smartphones or laptops, creating a “third segment” of computing between handheld phones and laptop computers. Success will rest on whether Apple can convince customers they need such a device – and a key factor could be price.

The first versions, without mobile connectivity, will go on sale worldwide at the end of March, priced from $499 in the US; UK prices are not yet set. Versions with 3G will arrive at least month later.

The view from some industry analysts tonight was that sales of iPad-like devices are poised to explode, after years when tablet computers have barely sold. “These ‘Goldilocks’ devices – not too big, not too small – are expected to have a break out year in 2010,” said Jim Sloane, lead technology partner at the consultancy Deloitte. “By offering a more appealing balance of form and function, net tablets will be purchased by tens of millions of people in the year ahead.”

But they mark a move from active creation of content to passive consumption, noted Ian Fogg, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “With the iPad running an iPhone-style user interface, it’s optimised for media consumption rather than creation.”

Jobs came on stage and praised Amazon’s Kindle, but in effect vowed to bury it. “Amazon’s done a great job of pioneering this [ebook] functionality with the Kindle, and we’re going to stand on their shoulders,” he said.

Apple is understood to be offering electronic content publishers a 70% share of any revenues from sales through iBook – and is allowing book publishers to set higher prices than Amazon has. That will be attractive to publishers worried that ebooks will undercut them.

Newspaper and magazine publishers will also be watching how well the iPad does.

Jobs warned Apple’s rivals: “Because we’ve already sold 75m iPhones and iPod Touches, we already have 75m people who know how to use an iPad.”

Apple will sell publications for the iPad through its online App Store, which already has 140,000 applications for sale. Scott Forstall, in charge of iPhone software at Apple, said that all those programs could run unchanged on the iPad. That gives it a potentially valuable lead over Amazon, which has only began to court developers in the past month.

The announcement crowns a decade in which Apple has remodelled the music, mobile phone and now – possibly – publishing industries. Earlier this week it recorded record quarterly revenues of $15.7bn, and profits of $3.4bn, a far cry from December 2000 when it warned investors it would make a loss of $250m on quarterly revenues of about $1bn.

The iPad is 0.5in thick, weighs 1.5lb (0.7kg) and can store 16 to 64 gigabytes of data. Apple claims that it is capable of 10 hours’ battery life, though real-world tests hardly ever confirm manufacturers’ claims.

The announcement brings to an end one of the most intense build-ups for any product – even from a company like Apple, which is notorious for generating excitement and hype among its legion of fans. The iPad project has been in the works at Apple for several years, but was repeatedly knocked back by Jobs. The latest tablet computer to hit the market, it still has some way to go before it convinces the public that it is worth buying. Previous tablets have proved merely niche devices – despite support from luminaries such as Bill Gates, who famously announced in 2001 that he believed they would be the most popular form of computer within five years.

But Apple, which helped kickstart the Silicon Valley computer revolution in the 1970s, has good form. Its Apple II and Macintosh personal computers helped popularise home computing more than 25 years ago, while the iPod – which was first launched in 2001 – went on to change not only the way we listen to music.

Meanwhile tThe iPhone, the iPad’s closest sibling, has sent tremors through the mobile industry since its launch in 2007. While it has not dominated the enormous mobile phone market in terms of sales – Apple has sold 41m handsets in three years, the same number Nokia sells in a month – it has won much of the more lucrative smartphone market, and drove its competitors to develop their own touchscreen handsets.

Catcher in the Rye author JD Salinger has died of natural causes at his home in New Hampshire

JD Salinger, who shocked one generation and inspired another with a classic novel of teenage rebellion, has died at home in New Hampshire, aged 91.

The writer, who avoided publicity and did not publish an original work over the past 45 years, was the creator of Holden Caulfield, the delinquent, alienated antihero of The Catcher in the Rye, which became required reading for generations of teenagers after its publication in 1951.

But in recent years his reputation was tarnished by two accounts, one by a former lover and the other by one of Salinger’s daughters, who painted him as a controlling and unpleasant eccentric.

The Catcher in the Rye was praised by the New York Times on publication as “an unusually brilliant first novel”. But while an instant hit with many, who related to its tale of adolescent angst and adult ­hypocrisy, it was met with alarm in other quarters. Some school boards made it required reading. Others banned it amid protests from parents over swearing – including the frequent use of “goddam” and, more rarely, “fuck” – as well as the bad example they believed Caulfield set.

Four years after the novel’s publication, Salinger expressed disappointment that the book, which he acknowledged was based on his own upbringing, had met with some hostility.

“I’m aware that a number of my friends will be saddened, or shocked, or shocked-saddened, over some of the chapters of The Catcher in the Rye. Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all of my best friends are children,” he wrote in 20th Century Authors. “It’s almost unbearable to me to realise that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach.”

John Lennon’s murderer, Mark Chapman, cited The Catcher in the Rye as an inspiration for the killing in 1980.

Salinger published other books, including the well-received Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey, before he became an almost total recluse. His last published work, Hapworth 16, 1924, was printed in the New Yorker in 1965.

Ten years ago, it was revealed that Salinger had a secret cache of about 15 novels which had never been published. In his last interview, in 1980, he said that he wrote only for himself.

His literary agent Phyllis Westberg declined to comment last night on whether the novels still exist, or are likely to be published.

In 1986, Salinger won an injunction against the publication of a collection of his letters. During the case, which went to the US supreme court, he was asked what he had been working on for the previous 20 years. “Just a work of fiction,” he said. “That’s all. That’s the only description I can really give it … It’s almost impossible to define. I work with characters, and as they develop, I just go on from there.”

Salinger was born in New York on New Year’s Day 1919. His father, of Polish Jewish origin, became wealthy importing cheese and meat; his mother posed as Jewish, and he did not find out that she was not until after his barmitzvah. He had his own troubled history in various schools until he was dispatched at 15 to Valley Forge military academy. There he began writing at night using a torch under his bed covers and published his first story in a fiction magazine in 1940.

He submitted a number of stories to the New Yorker which were rejected, including one called I Went to School With Adolf Hitler. But the magazine did accept a later story about a disaffected teenager called Holden Caulfield, the first time the character appeared.

In 1942 he was conscripted to fight in the second world war and took part in the Normandy landings. He married a German woman while serving with the occupation forces after the defeat of Hitler. They moved to America but the marriage fell apart. Salinger took up Zen Buddhism.

He found fame disagreeable, and the year after the publication of his most famous novel he left New York City for the town of Cornish, New Hampshire. There he remarried, to Claire Douglas, had two children, and then divorced in 1967.

In 1998, the writer Joyce Maynard ­published an account of her eight-month affair with Salinger in which she described his controlling personality. Two years later, one of his daughters, Margaret, wrote that he was a recluse who drank his own urine and spoke in tongues.

From High Fidelity to Heathcliff, the novelist presents the novels that epitomise teen spirit

Tiffany Murray’s first novel Happy Accidents was shortlisted for the Bollinger/Wodehouse prize for comic writing. Diamond Star Halo, her second, was published earlier this month. She studied at UEA, and has taught creative writing there and elsewhere. She lives in the Welsh Marches.

Buy Tiffany Murray books at the Guardian bookshop
 
“What is a ‘rock’n'roll novel’? Rock’n'roll – from Robert Johnson to Jack White – is a coming-of-age sound that allows us to find ourselves, and maybe others. Writing about it is complex, with clichés lying in wait at every turn. I love these novels because they attempt to capture threshold, anarchic times where anything might happen; that, to me is rock’n'roll. Remember Marlon Brando in The Wild One? ‘What are you rebelling against, Johnny?’ ‘What have got?’ Well, there’s a lot of that in these narratives.

“As with some of these stories, my own novel Diamond Star Halo isn’t written from the point of view of the rock star, rather from that of an observer, Halo Llewelyn. After all, rock’n'roll is a spectacle – of beauty, truth, all of that – and it’s one you want to drink in.”

1. Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie

Robert Johnson arrives on The Spokane Indian Reservation, “with nothing more than the suit he wore and the guitar slung over his back”. Misfit and storyteller, Thomas-Builds-the-Fire, wants to set Johnson’s guitar on fire and smoke some salmon over it (on the Spokane Rez, they’re salmon people). The guitar has different ideas. This guitar talks, sings the blues, and tells Thomas, “Y’all need to play songs for your people…Y’all need the music.” And so Thomas, Victor, Junior, and Chess and Checkers Warm Water become the band Coyote Springs. I love everything Alexie does. This is a blues plunge into the magical real, and the all-too-real, of modern Native American life.

2. The Commitments by Roddy Doyle

“The Labour Party doesn’t have soul. Fianna fuckin’ Fail doesn’t have soul. The Workers’ Party ain’t got soul … The people o’ Dublin, Our people, remember, need soul. We’ve got soul.” So says Jimmy Rabbitte, with the help of Joey The Lips Fagan. Jimmy knows his music. Jimmy knows his preaching, too, and when the Commitments are formed, for one sparkling drip of time, history is made. A brilliant debut from Doyle back in 1987, (and a brilliant film from Alan Parker, too).

3. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

Self-confessed “arsehole” and record-shop owner, Rob, shares his life of lists – girlfriends, break-ups, dream jobs, variously documented favourite songs – and tells us, “In Bruce Springsteen songs, you can either stay and rot, or you can escape and burn … but nobody ever writes about how it is possible to escape and rot … That’s what happened to me; that’s what happens to most people.”

4. Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo

“In endland, far from the tropics of fame,” rock star Bucky Wunderlick, holes himself up in a bleak apartment on Great Jones St, NYC, after a final tour where he can tell his star is fading because “boys and girls … were less murderous in their love of me”. Bucky’s intense, crazed narrative voice conveys both the gloriousness and the plain weirdness of fame. With an insert from Bucky’s conglomerate management, Transparanoia, entitled “Superslick Mind Contracting Media Kit, ‘The Bucky Wunderlick Story’, told in news items, lyrics and dysfunctional interviews”, the myth of the dead or disappeared rock star and the hovering subjects of money, drugs, terrorist groups, and possibly Bob Dylan, all hum through a 1973 novel that is not showing its age.

5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

OK, bear with me here, but to me – or perhaps the teen-me – the ultimate rock star was Heathcliff. He’s flinty, elemental, feral, beautiful, violent, mad, gothic, and so very, very rock n’ roll. I picture Jack White, although Jack is perhaps too nice. Brontë’s narrative structure – with the two outsiders, Lockwood and Nelly, telling the story – gives it the air of an exposé: the common man and woman, watching, reporting. You could call it a 19th century Almost Famous. This is why Wuthering Heights haunts Diamond Star Halo.

6. Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes

It’s 1958 in London – specifically the shabby west London “Napoli” where our narrator lives – and “youth culture” is taking its first swaggering steps. There’s sparkling modernity in the new language MacInnes indulges, too. “So I went out of the Dubious to catch the summer evening breeze. The night was glorious … The air was sweet as a cool bath, the stars were peeping noisily beyond the their neons, and the citizens of the Queendom, in their jeans and separates, were floating down the Shaftesbury avenue canals, like gondolas.”

7. Popular Music by Mikael Niemi

Swedish author Niemi proves there was rock’n'roll life in his country long before Abba. The narrator, Matti, will charm you as he dreams of becoming a rock star in Pajala, his ice-bound village, in the 1960s. The first time he hears Elvis he’s “petrified”. The first time he listens to the Beatles with friend Niila, there’s “CRASH! A thunderclap. A powder keg exploded and blew up the room……we splattered down on the floor in tiny damp heaps…Rock’n'roll music…Beatles.”

8. Owen Noone and Marauder by Douglas Cowie

An open-mic evening in a bar in Peoria, Illinois, a young boy watches Owen Noone play an impromptu rendition of “Sweet Child o’ Mine”. That young man soon becomes the Marauder, Owen’s musical sidekick. This is an on-the-road novel, and as we follow their story we imagine what American folk-punk might sound like (”Yankee Doodle” and “The Wild Mizzourye” are some of the tracks, pilfered from Alan Lomax’s collection of American Folk Songs). So genuinely rock’n'roll that French band Deskaya have released an eponymous song.

9. The Ossians by Doug Johnstone

Connor Alexander is lead singer of the Ossians, a Scottish band made up of his twin sister Kate, girlfriend Hannah, and best mate Danny. Connor loves gin, and more, “I’m the troubled artists, amn’t I? The old Cobain syndrome, nobody understands my torment and all that pish.” Named after a third-century Scots Gaelic poet, with a record called The St Andrew’s Day EP, the Ossians embark on a tour of the Highlands and dive into the underbelly of modern Scotland. As Connor tells a journalist, “it’s not as simple as ‘It’s shite being Scottish’… it’s both shite and great being Scottish, often simultaneously.” 

10. Groupie by Jenny Fabian and Johnny Byrne

My father said this was the book at the end of 60s. I see his point. It’s not exactly fiction, but what is? The groupie, Katie, a thinly veiled Fabian, was encouraged by Byrne to “write it just as you want and I’ll help you with it”. There’s plenty of sex and drugs to go with the rock’n'roll, and there’s great slang (”plating” in particular sounds very odd for what it describes). Ultimately Katie is the most interesting thing in the book. The boys, the rock stars, are rather one-dimensional, bless them. I suppose that might be the point.
 
 

Poet picks up £30,000 prize and huge increase in readership for A Scattering – which has sold fewer than 1,000 copies

An intensely personal and moving series of poems written as a tribute to his late wife tonight won Christopher Reid one of the UK’s most important literary prizes.

Reid follows in the footsteps of Douglas Dunn, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney by becoming only the fourth poet to win the overall Costa book of the year award, picking up, in total, a £30,000 prize and an incalculable increase in readership.

Novelist Josephine Hart, who chaired the panel of judges, said his winning book, A Scattering was “good bordering on great,” and that when she said great she meant the likes of Yeats and Browning. “It is devastating piece of work and all of us on the jury felt it was a book we would wish everybody to read.”

Hart said the winner, decided by an 11-person jury, had been chosen by a “substantial” majority. The dissenters were happy for it to win, she said. The strong favourite had been Colm Tóibín for Brooklyn who could be forgiven for developing a complex. He is something of a bridesmaid when it comes to major literary awards: he almost always nearly wins them.

Reid, aged 60, lost his wife Lucinda Gane to cancer in 2005. A Scattering consists of four poetic sequences, the first written when his wife is alive and they are on holiday in Crete and the other three - ‘Sparse breaths, then none - /and it was done’ - after her death.

They are poems that are often unbearably emotional as his wife dies in her hospice bed, in Reid’s tightening arms. There are poems about his wife’s brain tumour: ‘malignant but not malign,/ it set about doing - /not evil,/simply the job tumours have always done.’

There are also poems about the task of shaving her head for her - ‘Revealed: a handsome/unabashed smoothness/ I couldn’t stop wanting/ to fondle and kiss.’

Reid is a well established poet and was poetry editor of Faber and Faber between 1991 and 1999. Previous awards include the Somerset Maugham award, the Hawthornden prize and the Signa poetry award. This win is far bigger than any of them, however, and will substantially boost sales. Poetry being poetry - as in it is never a huge seller - fewer than a thousand people have bought A Scattering.

Reid won in what was a competitive field. Apart from Toibin the other contenders were Patrick Ness, a reviewer for the Guardian who won best children’s category for The Ask and the Answer - his second book of a planned trilogy; Raphael Selbourne who won first novel for Beauty, the story of a young Bangladeshi woman who returns to Wolverhampton after escaping an abusive arranged marriage; and Graham Farmelo for his biography of the very strange but very brilliant quantum physicist Paul Dirac.

The winner was decided by a diverse panel of 11 judges consisting of Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp; Actors Caroline Quentin, Neil Pearson and Dervla Kirwan; ITV political editor Tom Bradby; model Marie Helvin; biographer Robert Lacey; writer William Nicholson; author Sandra Howard; and Tom Fleming, deputy editor of the Literary Review.

Alister Babb, Waterstone’s poetry buyer, welcomed the win: “It is always significant when a work of poetry wins the Costa. Christopher Reid now joins giants such as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney as one of the few poets to take the prize, and in doing so, bring more people to this undervalued art form.”

Jonathan Ruppin, of Foyles, called A Scattering, “an extraordinary tribute to his late wife bursting with love and vitality.” He added: “Poetry is inevitably more of a niche market than the other categories, but this collection seems to have struck a chord: his dignity and eloquence puts into words the feelings of anyone who has lost someone dear to them.”

• This article was amended on Wednesday 27 January 2010 to correct Christopher Reid’s sales figure of “less than” 1,000 copies to “fewer than” in both the text and headline.

Wordsworth changed forever the way we view the natural world and the inner world of feeling. He also connected the two indivisibly. We are his heirs, and we see and feel through him. His vision illumined our landscape.

His name is inextricably connected with the Lake District, where he was born in Cockermouth in 1770. His mother died when he was only eight, his father five years later. These early losses gave him an acute apprehension of mortality, but did not impair the flow of his affections. His mother had loved him enough, and her love lasted beyond the grave. He had a free and happy country childhood, and joy is one of his themes: through his vocation as a poet he transformed fear of mortality to intimations of immortality. The story of his early life – his schooldays, his education at Cambridge, his wanderings in France, his response to the French revolution, his love of his sister Dorothy and his passionate friendship with Coleridge – are told in his great autobiographical work in blank verse, The Prelude, most of which written when he was in his 30s (only sections of it were published in his lifetime.) It is a work of astonishing originality, both in its subject matter (childhood and the growth of the mind, described with a pre-Freudian insight unprecedented in literature) and in its form. The verse is powerful, supple, subtle, freely flowing. Wordsworth revered both Shakespeare and Milton. His is the third great iambic voice in the English language.

His first volume of poems, Lyrical Ballads, written in collaboration with Coleridge and published in 1798, stakes his territory: the plain, the rustic, the thoughtful, the everyday, the organic: a poetry in which “the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature”. It includes The Idiot Boy, a moving ballad treating its challenging subject (a mother’s love for her “idiot” son sent out into the night to fetch the doctor for a sick neighbour) with the deepest respect and in the plainest language, and Tintern Abbey which records in higher language the intensity of the solitary poet’s youthful response to a sublime landscape (his “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures”) and his sense of a more “sober pleasure” associated with maturity, the presence of his beloved sister, and the power of re-creative memory and recollection.

Wordsworth was perhaps the most sober of the great romantics, a water drinker, a walker of the hills, an exemplary family man who had put behind him (though he had not denied) a youthful indiscretion and an illegitimate daughter. He liked to read with his wife and sister of an evening, and to listen to the kettle’s “faint undersong”. (Wordsworth loved the word under, as a prefix-adjective: it suggests to me his ever-present sense of the subconscious and the imminent, his ear tuned to music we can hardly hear.) He invested his hopes in family life and domesticity, in plain living and high thinking, with a tenderness towards his children inherited from the newly child-conscious theories of the enlightenment.

But children are hostages to fortune, and some of his finest poems pre-emptively record early death and the sorrow of losing a child. The enigmatic Lucy poems (1799), inspired by a winter sojourn in Germany with Dorothy before he had a family of his own, foreshadow loss. Were these poems connected with incestuous feelings for his sister, or with his apprehensions of the tragic risks of love, or with the early loss of his mother? Much has been written on this, little explained. The sources of the imagination are not as clear and simple as Wordsworth often makes them seem. Five years later, in 1804, he wrote The Affliction of Margaret, whose son is missing, perhaps dead:

Beyond participation lie
My troubles, and beyond relief.
If any chance to heave a sigh
They pity me, and not my grief.

The lonely precision of this strange cry of bereavement is heart-rending.

Then, in 1812, the Wordsworths lost a little daughter and a son: his sonnet to Catherine, Surprised By Joy, composed some time after her death, is the most touching of elegies, the movement of the verse mirroring the movement of the body, heart and mind, the simplicity of diction shockingly enriched by the Latinate “vicissitude”. He had mastered his medium and wedded it to the strength of his feelings. His sonnets stand with Shakespeare’s and Milton’s.

As he grew older, he was to lose his powers, and he had premonitions of this, expressed in his Immortality Ode (1802-4) and most famously in his 1802 poem on the leech gatherer, Resolution and Independence:

We poets in our youth begin in gladness
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness

His youthful belief that “our destiny, our being’s heart and aim/ Is with infinitude and only there” is deeply entangled with his sense of failure, of check, of sober disillusion in the light of common day. The highest affirmation and loftiest verse in The Prelude immediately follow his feeling of anti-climax as he discovered that he and his travelling companion had crossed the Alps without knowing it. And one poem for which I have a particular fondness is an odd 1804 piece about a small celandine (in contrast to more cheerful poems he addressed to this flower) in which he confesses to an unsentimental, no-nonsense meanness of pleasure as he regards its withering.

This neither is its courage nor its choice
But its necessity in being old.

He tells unwelcome truths as well as providing consolation. He is a poet for old age as well as youth.

Lionel Shriver on the trip she was commissioned to write about by a newspaper – which then villified her as a ‘junket author’

In 2007, the Sunday Times ­suggested that if I ever needed to go somewhere to research a novel, I might combine the trip with an assignment for its travel section. The protagonist in my new novel, So Much For That, dreams of escaping the hassle and expense of New York for a cheap, serene haven in the developing world. Pemba sounded perfect – an island off the coast of east Africa whose air is permeated by the aroma of cloves. But to end my book in Pemba, I would have to go there. I rang the Sunday Times.

Why would Pemba make a good travel piece, asked the editor. It draws very few tourists, I said. So it’s a great place to escape the bane of travelling: other people. Sold.

The newspaper covered my ­expenses, as it does for any travel writer. Pemba’s only resort, Fundu Lagoon (pictured), allowed a free stay, as it does for any travel writer. I filed my article. Fortunately, Pemba also proved ideal for my last chapter. For reasons of consistency – all locations in the book exist in real life – I cite Fundu Lagoon in the novel. I also thank the resort in my acknowledgement, merely to show good manners.

Where’s the scandal? Bizarrely, the Sunday Times itself insinuated last weekend that we sleazebag novelists are now auctioning off product placement in our books. Described as being “in the mood for a holiday”, I must have traded a setting in my novel for a freebie in the sun.

I’m never in the mood for ­holidays, having also published in the same paper a long essay on why I detest them. Pemba was work. Fundu never offered me anything in ­exchange for a ­mention in my novel. The headline “Junket ­Author Plugs ­Paradise” impugns all travel writers, any of whom could be tagged a “junket author”.

But then, “Business Expenses Covered by Employer” wouldn’t sell papers. The article surely aims to sow envy and bitterness in its readership. “What an outrage!” spits the subtext. “Sundowners! Lemon-grass oil massages! Here’s somebody whose work is sometimes pleasant!” For such articles to find an eager audience, I worry that much of the British public must be seethingly miserable in their jobs.