Swift, Graham

Swift, Graham (1949- ), English novelist and short-story writer. Born in Catford, London, and educated at Cambridge and York universities, Swift taught for some years before becoming a full-time writer. His first novel, The Sweet Shop Owner, was published in 1980, and was followed by five others over the next 16 years: Shuttlecock (1981), Waterland (1983), Out of This World (1988), Ever After (1992), and Last Orders (1996). He has also published a collection of short stories, Learning to Swim and Other Stories(1982).

Swift is widely admired as one of Britain’s leading contemporary novelists, and in 1983 he was included in Granta magazine’s influential list of 20 Best of Young British Novelists in a famous edition of the periodical that also featured Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Ian McEwan. Typically, Swift’s central themes of family relationships, death and bereavement, violence, and betrayal are rendered in an evocative prose style designed to explore the connection between past and present and to capture complex emotional truths. Personal histories unfold against a wider historical context, often with memories and recollections central to the narrative structure.

Swift’s reputation rests largely on the two novels Waterland and Last Orders. Waterland is the powerful story of a history teacher who, facing a painful personal crisis, feels impelled to examine his Fenland childhood. The novel also recreates the history of the Fens in closely observed detail. Waterland was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Prize. Last Orders reversed the honours, winning the Booker and appearing on the Guardian’s shortlist in 1996. It is the story of four male friends from Bermondsey, London, who meet one day to fulfil the last request of a recently deceased friend that his ashes be scattered off Margate Pier. Their journey across England is rendered in short sections with a variety of narrators, including the four men, the dead man’s widow, his adopted son, and even the dead man himself: in this, and in other ways, Swift’s novel allusively employs some of the structural devices and techniques of the similarly plotted novel As I Lay Dying (1930) by the American author William Faulkner. Again, present-day crisis leads the characters into a re-examination of the past, revealing their profound links to one another. His latest novel is The Light of Day (2003).