Kerry Young

Kingston, Jamaica

Your first novel, Pao, was nominated for quite a few awards, including the East Midlands Book Award and the Costa First Book Award, and your second, Gloria, has received another EMBA nomination. What was it like being nominated for the EMBA a second time?
I was very surprised. You don’t expect these things, so you don’t really think about them until they happen. It’s a weird thing. You write a book, and you try to write the best book you can at that point in time, and when that’s done it’s been such a long process and you’re just happy to have something that your editor thinks is good enough to go into print. By then you’ve almost left your judgement about whether it’s any good or not behind. By then you can’t see the wood for the trees: you’ve written it, you’ve read it so many times and you’ve re-written it so many times that you don’t know if it’s any good any more. I feel relieved that we’ve got through the work needed for the revisions, and then it goes into print and there’s a big time gap between when you’ve finished writing and when it appears on the shelf. From handing in the manuscript to seeing it in bookshops is about a year. And when I saw the cover I thought oh my God that’s so beautiful! Did I really do that? It didn’t seem real. And then you kind of forget about it because you’re on to the next book.

I went to the Hay festival a couple of weeks ago, and was standing in line to get a book signed by Toni Morrison, and as I was standing in line two or three people came up to me and said ‘I enjoyed your book so much’. One woman told me she had one of my books on the go at the moment, and it just seemed amazing to me.

You’ve said “being a writer pays tuppence, but it’s fantastic”. It sounds like that still holds true for you.
I love it. I think I’m very privileged. Not many people are lucky enough to get up to do every morning the thing they love to do. I love writing and talking about books and reading, so when I’m invited to go somewhere to talk about my book I just think it’s a huge privilege.

Kerry's first novel, Pao

Have you always written, or is it something you started doing recently after the MA in Creative Writing you gained in 2005?
My background is in the youth service, and I’d written a lot of stuff about youth work, non-fiction, so I had the discipline of writing. When I was much, much younger I kind of thought I’d like to one day write a novel. Then one day a friend of mine said to me “what’s the thing you’re going to wish you’d done, when you’re ninety in your rocking chair in front of the fire, that you regret not doing?” I didn’t have to think about it, I said “write a novel”, and she said “well, you need to get started then.” I just thought yes, that’s what I need to do. I think this was in 2002. My ambition was to write a novel that was good enough for somebody to want to publish. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do that. I didn’t want to self-publish, I wanted someone to say “Yes, that’s good enough for us to put into the market and support it”. I didn’t think beyond that. I didn’t dare hope that somebody would be Bloomsbury, or that a few years after I’d be working on my third novel. I just wanted to show myself that I could write a piece of fiction, which turned out to be Pao.

Do you think that your background in Youth Work has informed your writing?
I think the discipline has. I don’t do much every day now except write, so the discipline of getting up and saying ok, you’ve got to get through this chapter and produce so many thousand words has helped. The research I did for my PhD in Youth Work helped as well, getting me used to the research I later put into Pao and Gloria, about the history and politics of the region.

Pao and Gloria, and your forthcoming book, Fay, all tell different dies of the same story, and the three main characters’ lives all intertwine in the books. Which of the three characters was the most difficult to write for?
Pao took me seven years to write, and I found it difficult simply because I’d never written a novel before. I struggled with structure, with narrative voice, and had a terrible time with dialogue. I think I’ve become quite good at dialogue but when I started I was terrible at it. I found it difficult to mix the politics and history with the story without it turning it into an essay. With Gloria it was easier. I had less time to write Gloria, two and a half years, but by then I’d done it before, so I knew I could do it. It sounds weird, but the characters dictated each book to me, and it was easy to just write down the hybrid-patois I’d hear from them. Fay has been more difficult because she’s middle class and she speaks in a Jamaican accent in the same way an American or a Canadian might speak English: you’d hear it in their voice but wouldn’t see it if you saw it on the page. Gloria speaks in patois and you can see it on the page, but I can’t do that with Fay. It’s been difficult trying to find a way of making her sound on the page as she should, as a middle-class Jamaican speaking standard English. So I have to try and find a rhythm in what she says, or a way she’d structure a sentence that would let the reader know that what’s being said is in a Jamaican accent.

Before writing each book I don’t know the story of the characters until it’s on the page. I’d sit down to write Gloria and I’d know that a girl in her position would have to find a maid’s job and go into service, because that’s all there was, but aside from that what would happen would be dictated entirely by the character. I didn’t know how the story would end, or what would happen, so it was a surprise to me as I was writing it.

Gloria, her second novel

Fay is quite an unsympathetic character for much of the time in Gloria. She’s not quite an antagonist, but do you think it’ll be difficult to engender sympathy for her in the third book?
No, I don’t think so, because Fay’s had a hard life. You know from Gloria and Pao that she has a terrible relationship with her mother, Cicely, and from Gloria you know her father, Henry Wong, says that he never protected Fay from her mother, even when Fay was a child, because he was too scared to cross Cicely. At one point in Gloria Henry Wong says that he felt able to help Gloria and take her off the street because it didn’t mean crossing Cicely. He was able to help a stranger but never risked helping his own children, never even raised his voice to support her, so you know Fay’s had a hard life: a father and mother she couldn’t ever rely on. I’ve actually finished the first draft of Fay, and I haven’t found it difficult to paint her as a sympathetic character because once you see what she’s gone through you can understand why she ended up the way she is in Pao and Gloria.

Both Pao and Gloria are set in Jamica, starting in the late thirties and moving through several decades. The motto of the Jamaican people, “Out of many, one people”, seems to suit the characters in your books very well. Are the varied backgrounds of the characters a deliberate attempt to try and show the truth of that motto, or are they a natural consequence of trying to write about the real Jamaica?
It’s both of those things. That motto is really important to every Jamaican, and goes to the heart of what people feel is the heart of the country. That’s who we are. It’s important to Jamaica and it’s important in the books: Pao is showing the Chinese in Jamaica, Gloria is showing the Africans in Jamaica, and Fay is showing the mixture between the two, if you like. That’s my own heritage. In the UK (less so in America and Canada), lots of people think all Jamaicans are of African heritage, so I thought it was important to say no, there are other people there.

Do you have any plans for a book after Fay?
Yes. It’s unrelated to Pao, Gloria and Fay, and it’s under consideration at Bloomsbury at the moment, so I’m not sure what I can say about it. What I can tell you is that it contains similar themes: an ex-British colony, a plantation with Chinese and Indian workers trying to unionise. I don’t actually know for sure that the third book will be called Fay. That’s just what we’re calling it at the moment, but a better title might turn up. Fay should come out next year, but it all depends on how I do with the revisions.

Gloria and Pao are published by Bloomsbury, and are available in good bookshops everywhere.

Kerry Young website