This is an interview I did recently with H Magazine around the publication in Spain of my novel Memphis Underground. They will have run a Spanish translation but here it is with my original answers in English. I know some of my bilingual readers have enjoyed comparing the original interviews about the Spanish edition of Memphis Underground and their translations… so this provides another opportunity for them to do so. For those of you who don’t speak Spanish but are fluent in English, you get to read something you wouldn’t have access to otherwise. I haven’t run through all the Spanish interviews I’ve done yet but I’m tempted to call it quits with this one for now…

Stewart Home: Don’t send a work to the art show. Tell the curator it got lost in the post. Do it again for the next exhibition. No art is the best art! Curator: Great event score! I will use that as your contribution to the show (unless the postman happens to have found it). Stewart Home: Only a dishonest postman could find a work I didn’t send, they only fake my work so they can make money from collectors, ingrates! Curator: Bastards! Stewart Home: At least they’re ripping off the collectors. But they ought to give me a cut of the dosh!

I did this interview for a Spanish newspaper El Pais a few weeks ago and figured I might as well run it here in the original English. The Spanish publication of Memphis Underground has been generating a lot of interest there…. Jaime Casas: I see many different genres in Memphis Underground: from autobiography to meta-literature, but above all there is a sense of passion in everything said and done by the characters. It is a very a nondescript book it seems, and an experiment. But, I guess there are some ideas and intentions, what are they? Stewart Home: At the most basic level I’m saying there are many new ways in which we can write, and by analogy many new ways in which we could organise the world.

Violette Leduc spent three years working on the first part of her novel Ravages. When the manuscript of the book was presented to her publisher Gallimard in 1954, her readers there – Raymond Queneau and Jacques Lemarchand – decided the first third of the book should be nixed because it described a torrid lesbian affair between two schoolgirls. Ravages was offered around to other French imprints but no one was prepared to issue it without cuts. In the end a censored version of the novel appeared in 1955 under the aegis of Gallimard. Parts of the cut text were reworked and incorporated into Luduc’s 1964 memoir La Bâtarde.

I did this email interview a few weeks ago for Mondo Sonoro in Spain who mostly cover music but were interested in the translation of my novel Memphis Underground. I figured they’d have had time to run it in Spanish so I might as well run it as I wrote it here now. Joan Cabot: Memphis underground is the first of your fiction books translated to Spanish, can you tell me more about your previous fictional works and how MU fits into your writing practice? Stewart Home: My writing generally emerges from my reading, so my earlier novels were a product of my attempts to read in new ways certain strands of British pulp fiction that had interested me when I was 12 or so years old.