"Where it matters, you are on your own," he says. If you can launch yourself, then by the time things interrupt you're shielded against them." Not that there is always interruption. He likes to be at his desk early - at six or even before, trying to get started in "that space before things happen. The author of seven previous novels and a collection of short stories - including the Booker prize-nominated Waterland (1983) and the Booker prize-winning Last Orders (1996) - he has a new novel, Tomorrow, out next week. Apart from an unwelcome burst of notoriety in 1997, when an Australian academic accused him of taking the plot of Last Orders from William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying - a memory that still brings a troubled crease to his forehead - and an equally unsought moment of publicity when, in 2002, he switched from his long-term publisher, Picador, to Penguin (he has now switched back), Swift has largely managed to focus on his writing. He has made no public pronouncements on the war in Iraq he has never taught creative writing he doesn't even own a mobile phone. F or an author of his critical reputation and commercial success, the novelist Graham Swift is unfashionably discreet.
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