The Bookseller.com

2nd December 2008

PM: books are my passion

15.04.08 Benedicte Page

Prime Minister Gordon Brown predicted a rosy future for the publishing industry at a London Book Fair event in conversation with novelist Sebastian Faulks yesterday.

Brown said that Britain's creative industries represent 8% of the economy, and are growing at twice the rate of the economy as a whole. The education sector is also growing, and as publishing is at the intersection of the two, it is well placed for the next decade, he said.

Brown also revealed his own literary tastes, saying that reading was "the great passion of my life", one that he had feared he would lose forever when as a young man he lay in hospital after a series of eye injuries sustained while playing rugby. He declared himself a major fan of Ian Rankin and Raymond Chandler, saying that his formative teenage influences were Room at the Top, Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, and J D Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Despite his busy schedule, he said: "I read a lot, particularly in the summer. You put away books you want to read for your summer holiday."

Brown was being interviewed by Faulks about his own forthcoming book, Wartime Courage (Bloomsbury, November), and declared himself fascinated by "people who find these amazing reservoirs of courage through strong belief in what they are doing, which leads them to do amazing things you can only wonder at."

Faulks, a former journalist also famous for his depictions of war in Birdsong, suggested that there was "a slight contradiction" in the sympathetic, intuitive way Brown writes about soldiers' experiences in his book, and his actions as a politician in a government that had asked British troops to go to war "for reasons which seem to some opaque".

Brown said: "You do feel directly the losses being borne, the sacrifices being made. Is war in any circumstances justifiable? If we were not in Afghanistan now, the Taliban would be running the country. In Iraq, for 10 years Saddam Hussein had defied every resolution of the world community, and sometimes we forget that was the background. The issues of weapons of mass destruction and the reconstruction of Iraq are separate."

Of the LBF's Arab World Focus and the power of culture to help foreign relations, he said: "This is what will change the world. The world of the 21st century will owe far more to cultural contacts with people all around the world—not just through the written word, but the internet as well. When there is dialogue and cultural contact, people find there is more that unites them than divides them."

London Book Fair - Day Two

Benedicte Page London Book Fair Gordon Brown Home LBF Sebastian Faulks

Comments on this article