HarperFictionPresents...A Night in with Bernard Cornwell

[Music] well hello everybody and welcome to this fein online event a night in with bernard cornwell um i myself would prefer a night out with bernard cornwell but these are the times and we've got to deal with them um hello to everybody who's watching live tonight hello to everybody in the future as it is now uh watching this over the course of the next 48 hours um but hello most of all to bernard cornwell a man who needs no introduction but i'm going to give him a short introduction anyway he's written more books than i can count i tried i think it's over 50. i think it's fewer than 60. that may be wrong but they do include masterpieces of modern um historical fiction not least the sharp series series about king arthur series about 100 years war and of course what's in the age of netflix known as the last kingdom series the tread novels uh we're discussing the 13th and final last kingdom novel this evening uh hello bernard cornwell and hello dan it's very nice to speak to you again even in this rather strange fashion and hello to everybody who's watching i'm um insanely jealous i think is the only way to describe of your library is that where you write this is where i write yes um there's this sort of barn built back it's uh it's absolutely beautiful i've got to say um are you writing at the moment or you've got time off to talk about things well i am writing at the moment but i certainly got time off to talk to you dan oh you're such a charmer uh how is how let me get the lock down up out of the way first of all i mean how how has life changed or not changed for you as a writer when uh when you've been indoors well it really hasn't changed that much um and i'm sure you know this i mean we both have a job that is mostly a solitary vice you know i come to this room and i write and i've been doing that ever since the lockdown started and what i miss is seeing friends um but other than that life is pretty normal so you haven't found that there's you know do you get inspiration from the wider world or is it all contained in the books that are behind you um it's all contained in the books behind me and up here um i'm sure it is for most writers i rather like let's talk about warlord which is the last last kingdom uh why have you decided to bring the curtain down on this series just a history that brought you to the end or you've been up with it yeah i think we've reached the crucial point i mean the most historical novels have a big story in a little story if you look at gone with the wind the big story is the civil war the little story is can scarlet save tara and the trick of it is to flip them you put the little story in the foreground the big story in the background and the big story of the last kingdom of the utrecht books is the making of england and in the 13th book we really make it on the morning of the battle of brunellenberg there wasn't in england and it's not too much of a stretch to say that by the time the battle ended there was so you know that story the big stories come to an end so the little story has to end with it when you first conceived of this particular series of books um did you have that brand arc in your head and how structural are you as a writer did you you know did you say okay i've got a good idea for a 13 part series it unwinds i wish i could plan a book but i can't i mean i'm terribly envious of those writers who planned the whole book ahead let alone the whole series um i think it was the great deal doctor who said that writing a book is rather like driving down an unfamiliar country lane at night and you can only see as far ahead as your other weak headlights show and i think for me that's true i mean i've actually reached the last chapter of a book and not known how it's going to end but for me the joy of writing is finding out what happens just as it is joy of reading a book but i did know i mean that said i did know that the battle of brunember was going to be if you like the grand full stop on the series and of course you had a sense not only of this um the history of england but there's also a family connection here isn't there is is if you wouldn't mind telling a story i know you've told once or twice before but how you came to conceive of this particular series in this particular a well we go back to you know the big story and little story and i always wanted to tell the big story of the making of england because the saxon theory fascinated me for a long time but i didn't have any idea of a little story and then when i was in my fifties which is very late i met my real father for the first time and his surname was outright o-u-g-h-t-r-e-d and on our second or third meeting he showed me a family tree and the family tree went all the way back to odin the god so i am descended from god um and i thought wow that's my little story because i have a character i have a an ancestor called which is not far removed from outright um and they held on to their fortress in northumbria throughout the viking occupation of northern england so how did they do that why did they do that and what effect did it have on the big story so that really was the start of it and i discovered that i was actually descended from a man who eventually i made into my hero and is that part of the world you know i mean i've i've visited bambra castle and that particular stretch of the north east of england many times and it's you know one of my um favorite parts of england and even going past it on the train between london and scotland it's it's that that part of england has a real fascination with it's a part of england you knew well i didn't know it at all and strangely my wife and i went on vacation there this is i can't even remember when before i met my father and we rented a house uh very close to bambra and we loved it we absolutely loved the area and liked it so much the next year we went back and rented another house in the same place and then two years later i discovered that my family had once owned that fortress so i don't know whether there's any anything supernatural going on there but my first visit to northumbria was i just fell in love with it instantly and is that typical for the way that you've been inspired to write your novels over the years i mean does it take a sort of a chance encounter or a personal um revelation where is this or is there no typical way of ideas coming to you i don't think there's a typical way i mean with sharp it was obviously a spit i'm a spin-off or certainly a copycat hornblower um it just struck me that there were all these guys writing novels about the naval war against napoleon and nobody had done the same for the army which seemed to be rather weird um but for the others i don't know i really don't know where they come from um i mean usually when i'm writing one book i'm thinking about the next and all your question tells me is i haven't thought about what i'm going to write after the one i'm writing now so i'm getting a bit worried here well in that case let's stick in the the late 9th century um which is of course the the world that we're talking about when england is just forming when we have some great famous names like king alfred as is in the beginning of this series and and where of course your um your sort of uh your ancestor in um in fictional form is um is charging around causing quite a lot of trouble um what is it about the ninth century that makes it such an intriguing time to write about do you think well i think it is because of the big story because this is the creation of england um i mean i was always struck by the fact that i thought i had a reasonably good historical education in schools but we didn't nobody ever told me where england came from or how it happened i mean there was this assumption there's always been in england there always will be well there wasn't always anyways it's a dream that starts with king alfred um although he doesn't live to see it completed his grandson does complete the dream um so for me the fascination is simply this enormous historical period in which what we think of as the united kingdom took its present form very much the same thing was going on in wales under hewlett and much the same thing in scotland under constantin all at the same time they're making today's modern political map and i think that's the story worth telling and when you um came to start writing this series then i mean you said that this hadn't been something you'd learned as a matter of course in school it certainly wasn't something i learned as a matter of course in school either and uh i suspect my children don't um but did you have a sort of working knowledge of this period already had you read around it or did you have to then sort of go and do the dive into the history oh i had a sort of rough working knowledge um and i knew a lot of the anglo-saxon poetry which is very inspirational uh but i get there's as usual there's a lot of research to do a huge amount so yes i spent the last 15 years reading about saxons um traveling around england looking at places uh i don't think the research ever ends but you are a heavy uh you know the research clear well yes clearly within all of these novels there is a a depth of knowledge but i mean an easy depth of knowledge um in your books and it seems to me and tell me if this is um you know i've got this wildly wrong uh that um you've you've immersed immersed yourself in this period to the point where you're not kind of hammering home the little details they're just there and if you reach for the way that somebody gets on a horse or has a fight or uses a weapon um you just have this sort of sense of of the world well i hope so i mean that's what you aim for i mean essentially you simply have to make that background authentic um it doesn't have to be accurate it has to be authentic and very often the most difficult things as i'm sure you know doing research is not finding out about the big events it's finding about how people live um and that often was quite difficult but a lot of it is assumption of course the more you know about the period the more the imagination fills in those gaps what are the you know are you drawn to a particular um genre is the wrong word the discipline i suppose might be the right one um i mean when you're doing your research are you more drawn to uh you've mentioned poetry already with poetry history or archaeology i mean do you do you lean in one direction or the other no they're all wonderful and the archaeology is not usually quite as accessible as the rest because i was very lucky to meet the archaeologists who are working on the world where the battle was fought and i learned a lot from them you know tell us a bit more about this because in this decisive battle the battle of britain the location of the battle has until last year i think been something of a mystery hasn't it but now i mean if you put into google um battle of brynnenburg it often comes up with uh historical novelist bernard cornwell has revealed that the location of this great battle is is in the world i mean you you were clearly quite involved in the project i wasn't involved already um i mean a splendid group of people called world archaeology they did the work and they have i think i'm 99 sure they have found the battlefield and they were kind enough to invite me to go and visit which i did and i saw a lot of the stuff that they've found mostly broken weaponry and they found grave bits um and i think they made i'm sure they made the announcement it wasn't up to me to make it but i did sort of follow in their footsteps and say yes we found it and curiously it has been lost for hundreds of years and it's very strange because this was a major battle i mean in the anglo-saxon chronicle it says never was there such slaughter in this island and for hundreds of years afterwards every chronicle or animal in europe calls it the great battle and then we completely forgot where it was for and over the years there have been many many many suggestions ranging from solway firth to county dharam um there's one for a long time people thought it was fought off a lay-by on the a1 in yorkshire but it was i'm absolutely certain this was filled on the river um and that makes total sense because the leader of the army that fought against the saxons came from dublin the chronicle records that he brought ships across well if you're going to bring ships you're going to take the shortest route the shortest route will land you up on england's west coast not on the east coast so i'm i'm sure we found the place where the battle of brunnenberg was taught and i hope that one day there will be a visitor center there so people can actually find out for themselves what happened do you find that there's um an added pressure or indeed any pressure when you're fictionalizing a battle like that which which does mean a lot to um to archaeologists working on a project to find its location but also has has great importance in and britain's national history when you're writing a book like this do you feel any weight of responsibility to quote unquote get it right and we can talk about what get it right means in a minute talk about that forever we don't know what happened um i mean the anglo-saxon chronicle says that athelstan who is the king broke the enemy's shield wall and then pursued the obviously the enemy army that was mostly scots and irish vikings um they got broken they panicked and they fled and they were pursued so we know something about the back and we now think we know where it was fought but we're never going to know the real details and there's an awful lot of legend built into it um i mean apparently king athelstan sword broke and bishop um somehow conjured a new one for him um which was thought to be a miracle uh so you know out of that mess of myth and a few facts we have to try and put together a a coherent narrative that even if it's not accurate is at least authentic and convincing which is what i tried to do and it did help having walked that field and well let's i mean let's not talk forever about it but let's talk about this idea of what getting it right means in historical fiction now um we could be philosophical and say that all history you know it would be 1990s post-modernist 1980s post-modernist here and say well look all history is essentially fictionalized in any case all narrative is false you may as well be writing a sort of you know historical book as a as a work of historical fiction um i i sincerely hope that's not the case and there is some something that we can call objective reality uh nevertheless what what does for you in writing historical fiction what does getting it right mean what is being authentic to the period just drill down into that a little bit well enough it depends so much on what you're writing um i mean i've written a couple of books about the american revolution and in both those cases we've got a wealth of material i mean diaries letters newspaper reports um you can't obviously apply in the face of all that evidence and and just make it up so you are constrained by what is if you like recorded history but on the other hand if you're writing about the battle of brunenburg in the early 10th century the recorded history is so scattered to be non-existent i mean none of the people who fought there left a record of what happened um and the chronicle broke into poetry to record it um [Music] so in some ways it's easier when you're dealing with the 10th century or 9th century because you obviously can make a lot of it up you have to make a lot of it but you can't do that if you're writing about the battle of salamanca or god help you the battle of waterloo there is so much material and you have to get that right and i do sometimes play mary hill with the history even when it's recorded like that um but i try to confess it in the historical note and say look this didn't happen which i think is all you can do but essentially going back to my thing about the big story in the little story the big story has to be right but the little story is all fiction or almost i mean it's very nice for the little story can affect the big story but that's pretty rare um do you have a preference between writing about sometime like the 9th century when you have a lot of latitude to make up the big story as well as the little story or at least to speculate on the big stories as well as the little story um do you prefer writing that to writing um you know sharp when you're in a time where there just are more records there are um there's more evidence i always prefer writing whatever i'm writing at the moment i mean but i'm not saying they're both pleasurable um i mean writing sharp i know sharp background i know that big story so well that it's a pleasure just to be back in that scenario um in some ways it's more difficult to write when in fact there's very little in the contemporary record i wrote a book about the creation of stonehenge where there's absolutely nothing um and that was incredibly frustrating frustrating because in the end you have to make up a whole theology for these people which i'm not sure i succeeded in doing do you find that people turn to your books for um historical information about the past i did once get a very nice letter from a army officer who said he passed his exams at santos through um i think historical novels are gateways to history i mean when i was a teenager i read all the hornbler novels and absolutely love them and they were only 11 when i'd read the last one the only thing left to do was to go to the school library and get the books on the napoleonic war so born blur led me directly into the napoleonic wars and that's a valuable thing for a historical novel to do um i mean i'd love to thank the people reading warlord or the last kingdom want to find out more about the saxons if only to find out what i've got wrong i mean they're welcome i don't think it does any harm to for us to to know more about these periods or to know more about our history do you come across do you ever get um dissatisfied customer i mean i'm sure maybe one or two over the years dude i mean do you do you have people coming along and pointing out what you've got wrong and so is that well there's always a helpful reader and usually damn them they're right i mean when i wrote the three books about arthur um i mean i had a very indignant letter saying there were no snow drops in england in the 7th century but you know good to have that learned right um and other times i mean again i think it was in one of the sharp books i had a saw backed bayonet and i got this wonderful letter from a man who said that he was probably england's greatest expert on bayonets and had never heard of such a thing and what was my source so i confessed i made it up but that turned into a friendship um so that was nice oh yeah there's always always a helpful reader i mean i've long thought that i could write a book in which i said the french one waterloo and i would get no letters at all but if i wrote that the 43rd regiment had three buttons on their sleeve i would get thousands of letters saying you fool everyone knows they were four um odd enough that most interesting letters always came after i wrote the arthurian books and they all started much the same way dear mr cornwell i have just read your book the winter king and you have it all wrong i was lancelot in a previous existence and i have a whole fight it's a very thick part of letters from people who had a previous existence in the arthurian time there's nothing you can do about that i mean except to write and apologize for having got their life history wrong it feels strange that you say that because um i've never heard before now of lancelot being one of the sort of the people who respawns an awful lot in the modern age i mean one tends to get um ann berlin uh mari antoinette a little bit of richard iii um i wonder what it is about these particular historical characters that they keep coming back all the people feel this this deep connection with them over over the past what is it about lancelot don't know i mean maybe i can't remember it i might have made that up i mean i certainly had galway and i had 17 ladies who'd been with me um and i did actually write back to someone and say well tell me tell me what happened and um they tend not to know is the answer although i did have one who wanted me to go and sleep in a cave um and he said the dreams will come and will tell you and it is much to my shame that i never took him up on that but as a form of historical research going to sleep with a stranger in a cave in wales might it might have been valuable well that is uh that's very exciting i mean you're very good at engaging with your readers though i mean on your website you regularly post readers questions with your answers i'm i'm slightly addicted to that section of your website um i mean nick cave the musician i believe does a lot of this he has a more sort of holistic self-help approach to his answering and his his fans questions but in an age as a writer where it's very very easy for fans to send you letters claiming that they're they're gawain or gwynevere or queries about the the points of your books i how important is it to you to deal to interact with your fans and and how do you carve out your time because presumably you could spend all day answering um questions about sharp and about uh tread and so on well yes and i tried to bend it sounds chill as little time as possible doing that because it does take time away from the more important thing of writing the books but it is important i mean if they take the trouble to write to me they do deserve an answer i mean some of them infuriate me like a lot of uh kids around the sort of fifth form and six books who've got a project school basically asked me to write it for which i don't do but i you know i can understand the question and the other one which is very very it's not infuriating is is i had a great great great grandfather who served at waterloo what can you tell me about it well the answer is nothing unless you're lucky and have to have a really famous one but i haven't had any of those uh but most of them are really very nice questions and they're nice people the other frustrating thing is they i often get a question why did you do such and such to such as such a character in a book that i wrote 15 20 years ago and i can't even remember the character i let alone remember the book and all you can do is write honestly back to look i wrote a song ago i have no idea um which is frustrating for them it's frustrating for me but they're nice people i mean i do enjoy meeting if you do a book tour and you go to bookshops and you meet the readers really good ideas and it's valuable i can't do it you've had a you know a wonderfully long career i i should actually ask you do you know how many books you've written because i i knew it was somewhere in the 50s right a feeling it's high 50 57 or 58 i think but i'm not sure over the course of of writing those 50 books how have you found the the world has changed as an author because presumably in several decades uh it's changed profoundly i mean we've touched in the we've been talking about how to interact with fans but what else has changed well i suppose it's the ebook is the biggest change um that people are buying books and putting them onto ipads or kindles um and that too has a strange knock-on effect because i got a very indignant letter about three years ago from someone saying your new book is dreadful absolutely awesome i've loved all of your books but this book is absolutely appalling why do you have such sex in the book and i thought well that's very odd because i never really do that and so i asked him what book he was reading and it turned out to be by somebody else and of course when you're reading a book on a kindle or an ipad you never see the cover all you see is where you stop reading last time so you actually don't know what book you're reading and i do read on an ipad but i'm very aware of the fact that i'm often no idea who this author is that i enjoy um but other than that i mean publishing is still a business dan as you know but i mean it's these dear people who try and sell books to wonderful readers it's just the research part of the job changed because i mean i've said has the research part of the job changed because i've certainly found um writing history books that it's necessitated far fewer trips to big research libraries than it used to partly because of archive.org and the mass digitization of all those books of records and calendars of files that were put together by the victorians which are now out of copyright and google and various other big american universities have digitized um have you found the research process has changed or gotten easier i mean i know when i was writing utred um although i had a copy of the anglo-saxon chronicle it was so much easier just to go to a digitized copy online um but i'm a little bit wary of the internet and i somebody once said that if you had a million monkeys with a million typewriters that end up writing shakespeare's sonnets well they didn't they ended up writing the internet and there's a lot of terrible things but also something which i found the book i'm writing at the moment um had a scene set in a fortress in france and i had not visited this fortress and i doubt i'll be able to because of the pandemic but going on to google maps or google earth you could actually measure the fortress exactly i needed to know the size of the courtyard inside and i got it exactly it was 293.3 meters long and 98. something wide um and then you can also go to google images and look at that landscape it's extraordinary um i found it more useful in that way to actually look at a place uh then it may be only a minor place in a book it doesn't is probably doesn't deserve a visit or i don't have the time to visit um but you can tell an enormous amount from the pictures from google earth or from google maps going to the little man who walks around roads um so the internet has its use but it's still mostly booked you know i get it rip them off how would you how do you think uh utrecht would cope if you dropped him into the 21st century let's talk a little bit about um his character and and this uh this really quite um what's the right word for him uh he's not your uh all-round easily likable uh totally benevolent and classic hero is he this is this is a hero who's got real uh sharp edges to him how would he cope in the 21st century and then let's let's talk a little bit more about him well i imagine he'd get bail but i mean this is a very much an alpha male community i mean the story of the creation of england is a story of almost continual warfare and king alfred who was not i'm convinced a war like man i mean he was a scholar uh and he was also very sick for his whole life it's not that doesn't add up to a picture of the sort of male clad warrior um but he knew he needed warriors he knew he needed people who would fight and fight viciously it was a horrible horrible period in most of the battles the fought at arm's length or closer and to do that you need a peculiar kind of person who enjoys that activity is one of those i mean he's a warrior in a warrior culture um so i suppose that's where he begins in my head that he's a warrior in a warrior culture and is his uh danish you know scandinavian heritage an important part of building that aspect of his character by heritage of course i mean you know he's his education is cultural yes i mean it confuses him and it gives him a certain amount of attention with i mean in many ways for me the most important character in the books was it was not it was alfred um who was this extraordinarily clever man with an ambition if you like a dream and the dream was a united country um but he's a man who really cannot get along with i mean they are divided by all sorts of symptoms including religious ones i just think that's always interesting but it makes my life more interesting to write about a man who is at loggerheads with perhaps the greatest character of the period um and for all sorts of reasons turns out to be a pagan he's a pagan working inside a christian framework which means he needs to have those sharp edges i get a lot of letters from very kindly priests who tell me where uchid is wrong um but you know how difficult is it when you're building a character like that who is prone i mean i'm thinking early on in i think the second book in the series the pale horseman where uh he gets annoyed that someone's cut a tree down a steward quite early and just kills him i mean it's quite it's quite shocking and quite early on he was gunned down he was annoyed that he was being robbed he was annoyed that that steward was selling timber from his last without permission yeah and yeah it's a bit extreme um but i mean it's wonder it's wonderful understand because it occurs so early in the book that one um you're suddenly jolted upright and you're reminded of just how uh well impulsive in one sense but also um strictly moral this character is is it difficult when you're writing a character like that to make sure that you or how do you how do you balance the character so you keep sympathy on the reader's part when he does things like that i don't be honest um i mean the characters emerge the same way the stories do and i mean when you invent a new character like utrecht part of the joy of writing this discover who he is and what he does um but again i never begin with a template and say well i'll make this man or this woman into this this this and very often the characters in my book surprise they do things i don't want them to do or don't expect them to do um and usually it's best to let them do it it means that they know what they're doing so let them do it um i never never thought about utch in the sense of well what sort of a man is he uh he emerged and i think that's probably the best way so you never set out even with a sort of a basic um biographical template it's just here is a a short sort of entry letter yeah i mean i usually find the best way to open a book um is to simply put the hero into some situation and see how he gets out and then hope that that spins off into a story and i think they almost all begin that way how do you think he's um developed over the course of these 13 books i mean what how has his how has he changed in terms of your relationship with him um i suppose he's become more cynical um he's seen too much i mean we all do don't we i mean as we get older and we look at those who rule over us and you know when you're young you think these people must be wise now we realize they're a pack of idiots um because we've learned um i don't know i mean i've lived with utrecht for 15 16 years i mean the wretched man inhabited my head for a long time and again i didn't think about i didn't think about it i you know if i sat down to write a new book it really was just just that okay here we go again what are we gonna do together um and he's alive in my head but again i haven't given him a great deal of thought so i guess i can't answer your question probably a very good question in that case um a very bad one how uh how um did you feel finishing him off if you like you know finishing this this series was there i mean a kind of um uh is it was it jk rowling you know did you burst into tears at the end of the last book or what does it feel like to leave somebody behind like that well i haven't really left him behind i mean it's still there i don't think i'll write another one but i i'm sure i could if i really wanted to um i mean there was a certain sadness and a certain relief that you know i'm no longer back in that world and when you write a book that book wants you while you're writing it that means what you think about when you wake up in the morning is when you know when you're walking the dog suddenly there's ouch in your head talking um and that's all gone it's just managed but i don't think he'll ever be gone entirely from me because i spent too much time with him do you go back and read the previous books um before you sit down to write one or i mean or even in any at any point pick up a burn problem to do that but what i do is that all the books the whole series are in one giant file on my computer and so when i have a character and i think i i know he's been in previous books i use the finds thing and see what i said about it so you also zip through i think it's three million words and find out what you said about it um or her and that's useful but that's as much as i do i i never wanted to reread one of my own books you think you ever will maybe when i'm really old i'm only clearly old at the moment maybe it'll be interesting one day but i think i mean i remember once that um my wife put one of my books on an audio tape into the car and you know we began listening to it and i had to stop it i mean i couldn't believe i'd written a sentence that bad and uh so i just said take it out now and what kind of a writer are you when you're actually at work are you a splurge it out and edit it later are you you write clean on a first draft um do you edit day by day as you go do you what tell me a little bit about your process because i always find this very interesting with authors there and mostly they're weird i mean i'm sure you'll be the exception but how how what is your well it's a splurge really i mean the thing is just to sit there all day and get one thing down and what is most frustrating is that you normally get about a third or halfway through the book before you discover what this damn book is about and that means you have to go back to the beginning um i always think it was rather like climbing a mountain you get a third of the way up and you look back and you see a better route so you go back and you take that route and that propels you halfway up and then you turn around look back and again it goes on so the book gets written three or four times probably except for the ending which is lucky if it gets to revision but it's not a very efficient way of doing it but it's the only way i know how again because i simply cannot plan it out and the only way to discover the story is to write it yeah i remember that writer james hall said to me once that every book is a journey that has never been taken before how on earth can you map it out you can't you have to explore do you read i mean you mentioned hornblower earlier on um as something you were reading when you were you were young um were there who were the big influences apart from blower and do you still read historical fiction today or you know he is that i do i find it difficult to read most historical fiction because i spend all day writing it and you know suddenly but i mean hillary mantel he's a goddess and i just finished reading hamlet by maggie o'farrell which i think is a work of genius and i don't feel in that way that i am reading something that i could write um it's far beyond my capability to write and so that's the pleasure so yes i do i read historical novels but they tend to be novels that i wouldn't or couldn't write and what about your influence before you started writing who were the big influences on you and were you ever thinking okay i want to do it like x or like x plus what you know what was what well i think i wanted to do it like forrester and i doubt i've succeeded he's so brilliant but um i mean originally going way back 40 years the thought was well there'd been so many series about the napoleonic wars said at sea there's born blurs rammus that believer and then of course there was patrick o'brien coming along um that there surely must be a market for the same thing with the army um so it was very much copycat um based on the success of bumbler under the others um and then after i didn't know seven or eight years i thought well actually i'm now whether i like it or not i'm a historical novelist we better keep going on this and so it's getting off so it's gone on what about the television you know i mentioned at the beginning that this is now uh the last kingdom well of course i mean that's the name of the book but it's the name that's been bestowed upon the whole series effectively i suppose by uh by television by netflix so um how do you interact with um with the television adaptations of your books i enjoy them that's as far as it goes i'm not involved um carnival films who make them very very kindly invited me to go to hungary where they shoot them this was a couple years ago and gave me a cameo appearance where i was murdered by my own hero um and that was fun i mean it was great fun to be there and to see these guys walking around in their costumes and but that's it i mean i i don't want to be involved i don't want to be a technical advisor um i know nothing about making tv drama and they know everything um but i do enjoy them and i like alexander draymond's portrayal of the younger um so i'm just a viewer period are they i presume this is yes although i don't i don't know for sure how important or not important have they been to the the novel's um success and or their journey i mean how uh you know i was this time last year i was talking to george rr martin who of course was extremely successful in a number of careers before he he became the george rr martin of game of thrones um but clearly in in his case the television had had taken become a a huge part of of the writing process um as well as making the books you know massively better known than they had been before you know how has it affected um your standing or your reputation or your um your fame i suppose i have no idea you'd have to ask somebody else but um i mean uh obviously it's helped uh but i have i really don't know what the answer to that is um i mean i sit here in this room and i'm right and i'm not involved in that other side but i mean the sharp series helped enormous um i mean that the only influence that i've had is whenever i think about sharp i hear sean bean's voice and he was so perfect yeah i can i can hear his voice in my head um i mean it's it's a wonderful thing to happen to any any author um in television is an incredibly powerful thing as you know uh i'm regarded as added value i mean when you look at one of the stories in the last kingdom it may not follow the book exactly because it probably can't because they have constraints i don't have but you get all the added talent to the actors of the costume people of the makeup people of the producers the directors they all add their own contribution to it so it's added value and when people write to me and say oh i didn't like it because they changed your story i think well you know you're getting another story for free stop bitching enjoy it well that was what i was going to ask you do people assume that there is a sort of a creative ownership of the television um by you they blame me when it's different from the book and you know well maybe it's better than the book um and you know just sit back and enjoy it i've got to say bernard you are a remarkably um laid-back uh character for a writer um and i'm never sure whether it's uh it's highly strong people who are attracted to the business of writing or whether the experience of being alone uh in a room all the time uh makes moisturizing and you can really a great um calm to you is is is this can this really be the case or are you sort of frantic when you're not doing interviews to promote your books irish whiskey and good tobacco it's all i can offer as an explanation i remember reading an interview with lee child um a while ago where i think he swore by the with the three seas or four there were certainly champagne cigarettes coffee and there may have been cannabis as well and these were the ingredients that went into sending jack reacher off on his great adventures um and so maybe there it may be maybe the cornwall and child approach i mean empirically it means that yes it works yeah i always think of irish whiskey as writer fuel so can you i mean sort of semi-serious question can you write after you've after you've drunk several glasses of irish whiskey i i find i'm very much a sober writer i convince myself i'm good when i'm in the evening but i'm really not i've never been convinced by writer's block except that alcohol causes i mean if i even have a glass of wine at lunchtime that's probably the afternoon is gone and so like you i'm a sober writer but uh come six o'clock at night no and what do you do to um when you're not writing i mean i have a funny feeling you're a keen actor am i right well i was um i spent 10 years on stage in the summer stock theater in massachusetts but sadly they sold the theater out from underneath us and so we got evicted and which has been rather sad because it's sitting there empty and okay um but i've been sailing a lot with some which is another nice thing to do if you live on cape cod as i do um but i missed the theater i'm sure yeah how are you going to get back into it well i'm not sure that i am i think that career is over um which is really a pity and it was an extraordinary place because it was a theater that gathered together uh a group of i call them kids which is not really right drama students from across north america and sometimes from britain too and they were all training to be theater professionals and they would put on eight plays through the summer um and the directors were always professionals equity professionals from new york from london um and i somehow got involved it was an extraordinary decade of doing something i'd never done before and didn't know i could do it or anything else and it meant that for three months every summer i was in the company of these extraordinary young people who uh very clever very enthusiastic very irreverent um doing something that was the very opposite of what i normally do which is being solitary in this room and writing you know you're involving in a group of people so i miss it immensely but it's the only good came out of that was the book fools and mortals which was a tribute to the theater uh because i was in so many of shakespeare's plays i got more and more interested in shakespeare and how he actually did produce how his plays were first staged um so that was one good thing that came out of it and a lot of packing yeah that was a that must have been a very enjoyable um is detour the right word i i i hope i'm not betraying your editor's con confidence when i say that she came round for tea to my house one day and said and buddha's next book is is about the stage and no one gets brutally killed and i said gosh that's that's um was that refreshing i mean do you plan to write more about that kind of world no i don't think so i mean that there's attempt i don't know what i'm going to write in the future i mean i'm writing now but beyond this book i i don't know and normally i do which probably means that an idea will come within the next i hope couple of months and then while i'm writing one book i'm very much thinking and researching the next and then you mentioned you are writing another one at the moment can you tell us what you're writing i've gone back to sharp i always thought i would um there's a couple of gaps in his career which i i always tease myself that i would save them for my retirement so i'm doing it's not i'm doing a shop it was very interesting because i mean the moment that i opened up the blank page on the first day sharp came straight back into my head talking like sean b being grumpy so i'm enjoying it and after that you're not sure i have no idea [Music] the big problem would be to find a title for the book titles are always difficult um oh that was that was the editor who had tea with you she thought of that and she thought of fools and mortals and they never liked my type they always the biggest fights with the publishers always what was your title for warlord i can't remember enough to be honest i really can't remember um i don't remember at all the last kingdom was my title though well there we go that was that was the big one i think you know you claim credit for that whatever something sharps eagle sharks regiment shouts battle shots waterloo i wanted to call one of the indian adventures sharks curry but they wouldn't allow me um so i have no idea what this one will be i've used that most of them so i have to find something else well i've got one last question for you brandon um because i i told some of my uh facebook followers who are many of whom are very keen readers for your books uh that i was going to be talking to you and they submitted some very intellectual questions to ask you and my favorite of them is very simply what do you prefer writing with a pen or a computer a computer totally i love them i'm very fortunate i have the most informative stream on a 40-inch television set and you can have two full pages and larger than life which makes rewriting so much easier and i mean i so rarely write with a pen these days my handwriting is appalling not as bad as my wife that looks like a drunken spider just crawled across the page but i don't think anybody could read my handwriting and i can't imagine writing a book well yes i mean i said so you could never be the james elroy writing long hand on legal uh legal pads and sending it off to some somebody else's deciphering type up i don't like the wonderful mary wesley who did the same thing and wrote them all in longhouse and i can't even i can't even imagine it i mean the first books were written on typewriters and i remember that but i wouldn't want to go but i don't think i've even got a typewriter any longer but no i love the computer well i love the computer as well because uh and this is a really good segue that i'm very proud of it's given us this chance to sit here and do it in our new library your brilliant new novel warlord um i'm i'm getting messages on my screen saying uh well effectively shut up um so with uh with that in mind and also i think my wife yes here she is uh so on that note we are live uh go away this is now a longer um on that note um it's been a real pleasure to talk to you have this insight into not only the wonderful novel you've written the wonderful series the life of a writer which um uh i think is totally unique from person to person but yours more unique maybe than anyone else's uh but it's always a pleasure to talk to you thank you very much for taking the time and of course thank you um everybody else for tuning in to this rain online of them hope you've enjoyed thank you dan stay safe

Channel: HarperFiction Presents

Views: 3,098

Rating: 4.9591837 out of 5

Keywords: BernardCornwell, authors, authorspotlight, historical, thriller, TheLastKingdom, DanJones, reading, books, literaryevents

Id: bhkJRel5348

Length: 58min 31sec (3511 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2020