The Bookseller.com

7th October 2008

Kate Mosse is the author of six books, including the bestselling novels Labyrinth and Sepulchre. The co-founder and honorary director of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, she will present the next series of "A Good Read" for BBC Radio 4 in the spring.

We take too much for granted

03.06.08

A golden age? Or a time of threat and uncertainty? There's a wonderful variety and volume of books for all ages, tastes, experiences; prices are down; there are all sorts of ways for readers to engage with authors at author events, literary festivals in tents and town halls and li­braries; we have an impressive and varied number of literary awards; and an increasing index of titles available in bookshops, online, in supermarkets, in libraries or with book swaps.

Of course, some projects succeed, some do not. That's the nature of risk, the nature of writing. Playing it safe for fear of failing or offending someone doesn't lead to the most worthwhile projects or the most challenging or exciting books. But, overall, pretty healthy? Yes?

Well, not if the tone of some quarters of the literary press is anything to go by. What Tom Stoppard called "the drizzle of complaint" seems depressingly widespread, a sort of gleeful 'I told you so' every time something doesn't come off—a new novel, a biography, an initiative to boost reading or writing.

I'm just back from a literary festival in Bulgaria, a guest of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation. Set up by the international bestselling novelist of The Historian, the EKF's aim is to create opportunities for Bulgarian writers by facilitating the translation of their works into English, to establish contacts with American and British authors, to popularise the teaching of creative writing in Bulgaria, and to encourage and publish talented authors in Bulgaria.

We spent four days in the Black Sea resort of Sozopol learning about the Bulgarian publishing industry. There, nothing is taken for granted and a spirit of co-operation and admiration for the work of others is the backdrop against which all the debates took place. People did not always agree and they argued fiercely for their points of view. But it was always within the context of the shared belief that all initiatives to support the written and spoken word had value and that rivalries and jealousies had no place in the wider scheme of things.

Listening to the Bulgarian writers talking about their developing freedoms to write, to think, to translate, to publish, it struck me that in the UK we take too much for granted. That, careless of our literary freedom, we do not celebrate our opportunities enough and are too quick to find fault. Despite the fears and threats, these are good times, not bad. We should make the most of them.

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