Acceptance: 1987 Phoenix Award

Acceptance: 1987 Phoenix Award by Leon Garfield Ladies and gentlemen, first of all I want to thank you for the honour you have done me by awarding the Phoenix to Smith, not least because K puts me in the company of Rosemary Sutdiff and Bob Burch. If prizes are to be valued according to the quality of their recipients, then the Phoenix stands very high indeed. At the moment I feel at the wrong end of a postcard, inasmuch as my sentiments are not so much, "Wish you were here," as, "Wish I were there!" So I must remain a disernborJed voice. But perhaps that is best for a writer. Books, I feel, once written, belong to the reader; and the writer should mind his own business and let the reader's imagination take what K wants. I remember once talking to a school about Smith. There was a boy, a fidgeting, restless, disagreeable-looking boy, who when at last permitted to speak, announced that Smith was the book for him. My opinion of him went up and I saw that, far from being disagreeable, he was a most sensitive and kiteHgent boy, blessed with discrimination and good judgment Then he went on to tel me why he had Iked the book, and, giving way to enthusiasm, he launched upon a splendid exposition of the story, improving on it at several points. Finally, exhausted as much by his own Invention as mine, he concluded by saying that it was a very good book and I ought to read it. I believe it was the same boy-arthough I Uke to think it was another,-for a writer always Ikes to multiply the number of his admirers-who explained why he thought that Smith was a book that had something in it of value for everybody. There was, he. said, pick-pocketing for boys and sewing for girls. Smith was a book that cost me a great deal of labour to write, it was my third book; and, as the two previous ones had been first-person narratives, my editor, Grace Hogarth, thought it time I grew up and left the nursery of T for the grown-up world of 'he'. I was thrown into a panic. No longer could I hide my historical Ignorance under the convenience of seeing only what one pair of eyes would see. Mistakes made by a first-person are mistakes made by a character, and, to the charitably-minded, can seem deliberate. But mistakes made in the third person are mistakes made by the writer himself. So I had to work hard and do a great deal more research, for which I was fitted neither by inclination nor training. Because I never knew where to look precisely for what I wanted, I stumbled upon many an Kern of queer and out-of-the-way information when looking in quite the wrong place. In fact, many of the episodes in Smith arose from just such chance encounters. I only found out about the ventilators in Newgate Prison because I was looking up something else; and, although I kept to my original intention to have Smith escape under his sister's skirts, I couldn't resist using the ventilators as well. I stl do research in the same haphazard way. Sometimes people ask me why I don't employ a researcher and save myself time and trouble. The answer is that »part from the cost, research for a storyteler is like the quest for the right husband or wife. You don't know what you're looking for until you find it. There now) I think I've taked enough. I'm sure the bar Is open, and you all have better things to do. In conclusion, whle thanking you again, let me remark on the paradox of awarding a pipe-smoker the Phoenix. Far from rising from the ashes, the ashes most frequently arise from mel 20 ...