An Interview with Anthony Cartwright

Anthony Cartwright

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On April 12, 2013, Tindal Street Press released a statement detailing why it had published Anthony Cartwright’s third novel, How I Killed Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher, the eighty-seven-year-old former British prime minister, had died four days earlier, and as part of an attempt to preempt renewed criticism of the work’s provocative title, the independent, Birmingham-based publisher described its pride at having released a novel that it called an “elegiac, sensitive, and important” piece of fiction. The launch of a new paperback version of Cartwright’s book (originally published in 2012) was brought forward from August to April 22, 2013. It was part of what The Bookseller described as a “flurry of publishing activity” in the aftermath of the ex–Tory leader’s death. Tindal Street Press was at the center of and benefited from this “Thatcher effect” which, according to The Independent, resulted in a dramatic increase in book sales throughout the industry during April and the subsequent months of that year. With macabre irony, it was the kind of boost to the market of which Thatcher herself would no doubt have approved. For Cartwright, however, How I Killed Margaret Thatcher was not mere opportunism. Long before her passing, the writer had been interested in Thatcherism, its legacy, and the profound social changes brought upon the working class by neoliberalism, the form of political and social management that she so keenly advocated. His three novels—The Afterglow (2004), Heartland (2009), and How I Killed Margaret Thatcher—are all located within working-class communities in and around Dudley in the West Midlands. Cartwright was born in the town in 1973, and by setting his first three novels there, he represents what is a rare and sustained commitment to fictional depictions of working-class life and experience in twenty-first century Britain.

In 2004 Cartwright won a Betty Trask Award for The Afterglow, a book which also earned him a nomination for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He has twice been shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, as well as the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize in 2013 for How I Killed Margaret Thatcher, while Heartland was adapted by the BBC for its Radio Four series Book at Bedtime. Cartwright is currently a writer-in-residence with First Story, a project that runs year-long writing workshops in English state schools. He has worked as an English teacher in East London and the former mining town of Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, as well as taught creative writing M.A. courses in London and Nottingham. His second novel, Heartland, was translated into Italian by Rome-based 66thand2nd and also ran in a shorter form in the L’espresso magazine section of the Italian national daily newspaper La Repubblica. A growing profile in Italy led to Cartwright’s being commissioned by Isabella Ferretti from 66thand2nd to write his latest novel in collaboration with poet and novelist Gian Luca Favetto. Entitled Il Giorno Perduto (“The Lost Day”), this coauthored work was published in May 2015 to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the Heysel Stadium disaster in Belgium, in which thirty-nine football spectators (thirty-two Italians, four Belgians, two Frenchmen, and a Northern Irishman) died before a European Cup Final between Liverpool and Juventus. The novel follows both a Liverpool fan and a Juventus supporter as they make their respective journeys across Europe to the match, placing the events of that spring day in 1985 into a wider social and political context. Originally released in Italy, Cartwright and Turinborn Favetto are in talks with a number of publishers in Britain about an English translation of Il Giorno Perduto.

In many ways, this latest work operates within the same milieu as the three novels published by Cartwright in Britain: working-class culture, politics, trauma, and the legacy of the 1980s. The particularities of space, place, and class are a distinctive feature of his loosely connected trilogy. And all three novels are drawn together by an exploration of the processes of deindustrialization and the [End Page...