On Tuesday one of the most prestigious prizes in the literary world will be announced. But while many of those browsing in their local Waterstone’s will have heard of last week’s Orange Prize for Fiction — awarded to Lionel Shriver for We Need to Talk About Kevin — far fewer seem to be aware of the upcoming Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. Both prizes come with the kind of 30,000-pound award which usually guarantees attention, and both were launched in the 1990s, but the latter has to counter an ingrained artistic bias against works of non-fiction.What many people think of as non-fiction is likely to include well-established disciplines such as history, biography or travel. It may include works of reference, textbooks, the Encyclopaedia Britannica even. It is not generally considered to be a creative discipline. But it is — and a growing one. Truman Capote’s groundbreaking 1959 story of the murder of a rural American family, In Cold Blood, is the work credited with establishing a new genre of creative non-fiction. The book — described as a “true novel” — was elevated by Capote’s considerable writer’s skills beyond journalism into a highly original and accomplished work. In Cold Blood was followed by Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, both telling stories of killers and their crimes.The novelist’s art lies in creating a believable plot. But true stories can be equally challenging. They may be full of coincidences that a novelist would never think of trying to get away with; they usually don’t end tidily and neatly; there are almost always too many characters; and facts may simply be absent. The writer must employ all his or her creative skill to 6 make the story work.If writers of non-fiction may once have aspired to become novelists, fiction writers are now turning their hand to non-fiction. Barbara Trapido is, of course, better known for her novels. And this year’s Samuel Johnson shortlist contains a book by the award-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who has used his childhood, in an apartment block inhabited by others of his extended family, as a starting point for a memoir of the city of Istanbul.The distinction between non-fiction and fiction grows ever more hazy. Novels are often based on true stories. Real-life stories may be written like novels.Excerpted from an article by Aminatta Forna in ‘The Guardian’, June 11
