Boston Globe–Horn Book Award Acceptance

hat a joy to come to Boston to receive this wonderful award. Thank you to the Boston Globe, the Horn Book, and everyone involved in the judging. Thanks also to my brilliant publishers, Delacorte Press/Random House Children's Books, who right from the start have given me such huge encouragement, support, and friendship. It's a real thrill for me that my work has been so well received in the United States. My stories take place in a small northeastern corner of a smallish European country. My characters speak in northeastern rhythms and northeastern accents. To be specific, they speak the northern dialect known as Geordie. They speak a little bit like I do. And to be honest, the places and people that inhabit my stories have historically been pretty much excluded from mainstream English culture. To many cultured southerners, the northeast has been seen as a pretty barbaric place, and the Geordie accent has been seen as really pretty distasteful. Happily, things are changing. And here I should again mention my publishers, and my editors — Lawrence David, Karen Wojtyla, and now Stephanie Lane. It would have been easy for them to take the attitude that my "localisms" might interfere with a reader's instant understanding, that the books must be editorially smoothed over, that the language must be subdued into some transatlantic blandness. But they don't, which is marvelous. I do often wonder, though, how my American readers picture, say, the fading northeastern seaport of Blyth (which features in The Fire-Eaters), or what they make of, and how they hear, snatches of dialogue like "hadaway and shite." Of course, I could take you to the seaport of Blyth, and if we listened long enough, or provoked someone sharply enough, we'd be pretty sure of finding someone (like, say, Joseph Connor) who would come out with those exact words. So these are real places, real people, real words. But then again, of course, they're not.

As soon as a writer puts a place into a story, it immediately becomes an imaginary version of the place. My characters are imaginary versions of real people. My Geordie accent is an imaginary Geordie. Like all stories, The Fire-Eaters brings together two opposites, things that in day-to-day life are mutually exclusive: the imaginary and the real.

Another paradox. The more my stories have focused on one small particular area of the world, the more widespread has been their appeal. The stories that changed the direction of my work and generated the work I write now, and that were for me a massive influence on the book that has won this award, are the stories in my book Counting Stars, a series of semi-real, semi-imaginary tales that tell of pretty insignificant events concerning pretty insignificant people (me, my brother and sisters, my parents, my mates) in a pretty insignificant place (Felling-on-Tyne, where I grew up). But what is significance? It doesn't just exist in earth-shattering events. There are features in all lives, wherever and whenever they are lived, that are recognizable to all of us. One of the functions of stories is to bring together two more opposites: the local and the universal.

My own journey as a writer, my own struggle to resolve the paradoxes, has been greatly helped by American writers. Here's a little tale that links a little corner of England with the U.S., and a scruffy lad with a literary hero. I was thirteen, fourteen. It was autumn, and it was growing dark in Felling-on-Tyne. My jeans were scuffed with grass and mud. My hands and forehead were grimy. I'd been playing soccer with my friends since teatime, dreaming that our bumpy patch of grass was Wembley [Stadium], that I scored the winning goal for Newcastle in the [Football Association] Cup. When we couldn't see the ball anymore, we went our separate ways. I crossed the narrow street and stepped into a small square building, a single room lined with books: our branch library, my other familiar field of dreams. It was a little, unspectacular place next to Wiffen's shop and the Jubilee pub, a place that the soccer ball thumped against when our passes went wrong. It had a small collection, a fraction of what was held in the central library over the hill in Gateshead two miles away. But that small collection had long been a treasure trove. And I'd already begun to gaze into the future and to dream of books bearing my name standing on these shelves. That evening, I probably paused for a moment at the wackier section of Religion and Philosophy and reminded myself how to perfect astral traveling, or stared at pictures of the victims of spontaneous human combustion. Maybe I read a few lines of Stevie Smith. Perhaps I read the details of Newcastle's real FA Cup triumphs to fortify my dreams. Then I moved to the fiction shelves. H. I remember seeing the name, Hemingway, in bold letters on the spine, and the title, The First Forty-Nine Stories. I remember tipping the book backward and drawing it toward me. A book of short stories. I took it to the little table by the window. The familiar streets glittered outside. Familiar figures strolled by. The lights in the Jubilee shone and the shadows of early drinkers moved across its frosted panes. I opened the book at random. Page 310. A little story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." "It was late and every one had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. . . ." An old man drinks brandy, two waiters talk, the lights burn and are then switched off, they all go home. Just four pages long. It seemed nothing. Something that could easily be overlooked or dismissed when seen against the fat event- and character-filled novels surrounding it on the shelves. But I burned with excitement. For the first time I didn't just know that I wanted to be a writer. I now began to know what kind of writer. I'd found my first mentor. The tale goes on, of course. The passionate blend of discovery and recognition when I encountered new writers was repeated many times. As with all tales, though, it continues to be informed and energized by its start. In a clean, well-lighted place I read "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and my life was changed forever.

My own branch library still exists. Maybe as I tell this tale a fourteen-year-old strolls in to plunder the treasure chest. Maybe he takes down one of my books and dreams of seeing his own name on the cover. He grows up, he writes a book, a fourteen-year-old strolls in, takes down this book. . . The tale is passed on from generation to generation in a little library in a little town. . . And maybe one year you'll be welcoming one of them to Boston to receive the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award.

There are many other writers, other paradoxes. I've learned much about how to be a regional writer in England by reading regional writers from the States. I learned a lot about writing Geordie, for instance, by reading the passionate Texan tales and novels of William Goyen. I learned about the inevitable struggle from Flannery O'Connor, who wrote, "The image of the South, in all its complexity, is so powerful in us that it is a force which has to be encountered and engaged. The writer must wrestle with it, like Jacob with the angel, until he has extracted a blessing." She was writing about a hot South a million miles away from my cold North, but I think I understood what she meant. This book, and this award, are blessings of a kind.

So where did this book come from? Here's another story, which begins with another story, which will probably never appear at all. A couple of years back, I was writing a book called "The Apprentice." A boy had run off with a mysterious escapologist. They meandered across the beaches and moors of Northumberland. They met ghosts and spirits, and they had all the substance of ghosts themselves. The book was strange and poetic. It was long-winded and aimless. I woke up one morning and knew it was nonsense. I threw it away, a whole year's work. In the silence left behind, I heard a vicious voice: "Pay! Get yer money out and pay!" It was a voice that led me back to my own childhood, and to the joys and terrors of being eleven in 1962.

Before I was born, Newcastle was like Marrakech. On the Sunday morning quayside market, in the gaps between the stalls, the Human Ostrich gulped down light bulbs and razor blades and blew smoke from his ears. Harry the Boot King sold herbal remedies and dodgy ointments. There were fortunetellers, quacks, masseurs, strongmen, almanac-sellers, acrobats, racing tipsters, buskers, magicians, card-sharps. . . . The Sunday morning market still goes on. And there are still some relics of that past in it, despite the smart hotel and the galleries and the bars and cafes that have supplanted all the dockside cranes and warehouses. My grandfather used to take me there when I was young. He was a bookie, and a massive, silent man. His waistcoat pockets were always stuffed with rolls of fivers. Come rain or snow or shine, he wore a blue serge suit, black Oxford boots, and checked cloth cap. He puffed endlessly on a pipe. One Sunday he lifted me up to peer through a crowd, and at the center stood a little glaring man with a huge cartwheel gripped between his hands. "Pay!" he yelled. "Get yer money out and pay!" He shoved his cap at the spectators, counted his coins, cursed our meanness. I thought he'd never do anything, then at last he spat, lifted the cartwheel onto his brow, and balanced it there, tottering and grunting beneath the weight of it. He tilted his head, the cartwheel fell, the quayside shuddered. "See?" he hissed. "See?" And he gathered himself for his next trick, his next feat of fortitude, craziness, and strength. I saw this man many times. He stabbed himself with needles, whacked himself with metal bars, broke free from straitjackets and chains. Each time it was the same: the long wait; "Pay! Get yer money out and pay!"; then, at last, the despairing spit and the performance. I was eight or so years old. He fascinated me and scared me stiff. And here he was again, all these years later, yelling from inside my head. I had to write of him. I named him McNulty. His mind had been fractured by his awful days in Burma during World War II. My eight-year-old self was replaced by an eleven-year-old boy called Bobby Burns. My grandfather was replaced by Bobby's mother. Bobby met McNulty on the very first page and the story, unlike "The Apprentice," started straight away to blaze with life.

As I wrote that first page, the buildup to the assault on Iraq was starting. Words like war and bomb and threat were being used with dreadful abandon. They called out more echoes from my past, from the autumn of 1962. I saw myself with my friends in the classroom, watching the horizon with true fear, expecting to see bombers, missiles, mushroom clouds. I recalled whole classes of kids taken to church for the day to pray for the salvation of the world. And I knew that Bobby must meet McNulty at the beginning of those awful days. As Bobby's mother lifted him up to peer through the crowd, as McNulty's eye met his, Russia was setting up nuclear missiles in Cuba. Soon Bobby would know that his lovely world was on the verge of destruction. The whole world would know that the gates of Hell were swinging open. And I knew that as well as being an escapologist, McNulty had to be a fire-eater, belching out the flames that could engulf us all.

Books — stories — are things that draw us to them. They speak across the globe; they reach across frontiers. They bring together the imaginary and the real, the local and the universal, the present and the past. They bring us together, just as they did when the first stories were told by firelight in ancient caves. They bring us together because each of us has that thing that is both ordinary and quite astonishing: the imagination, which allows the writer and the reader, the teller and the listener to reach out to each other. And each time a story is told or written, listened to or read, an act of re-creation and of optimism occurs, the forces of destruction are repelled for a time, and the world is renewed.