Joanna Trollope was educated at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. She joined the Foreign Office and held various teaching posts before becoming a full-time writer in 1980. Her first published books were historical novels, now published under the pseudonym of Caroline Harvey in order to distinguish them from her contemporary fiction, which followed from 1989 and includes The Choir and A Village Affair. The Rector’s Wife, published in 1991, was her first number one bestseller and made her into a household name. Her latest novels are Daughters-in-Law (2011) and The Soldier’s Wife (2012).
Q&A
What made you want to become an author?
I think we all have a particular filter through which we see the world. It could be sport, dance, numbers, pictures or music - anything really that each of us feels where we are most at home and most able to express ourselves. And for me it was always words and, when I was still quite small, being of an age to have grown up without television, the power of written stories. I am a firm believer in narrative. I also wanted to communicate with other people, I always have. All of which, I suppose, adds up to becoming a writer.
As a parent, do you feel you had a role in supporting your children’s and grandchildren’s literacy? What do you think this is?
Any reasonably educated household can't help but be a support to family literacy. If reading and writing are a given in a family, it is far easier for the children to learn how to do both, as if by osmosis. I certainly read to my children, as I do to my grandchildren, and they were and are used to seeing me surrounded by books. If books are taken for granted in family life, literacy is naturally encouraged quite early as a passport to almost everything worthwhile that follows in life.
One person in six struggles with basic literacy; in your opinion, is enough being done to promote and develop literacy skills?
I'm not sure you can do enough. I'm really saddened by the abiding shame that accompanies not being able to read and write properly - and cheered by the real joy that comes with learning to do both. I'm not an educationalist, but literacy does rather seem to me to be the first consideration of primary education, because it is so fundamental to all the other crucial life skills, even numbers. Because illiteracy is still a taboo, there may be an abiding reticence about exposing and rectifying the number of people, especially young ones, in the UK who suffer from it - but silence only contributes to the shame and the suffering.
On your website you state “I am committed to people”. How do you feel better literacy can help the disadvantaged in society?
Literacy means not just that people can learn to drive and shop and travel, but, even more fundamentally, they can feel that they belong. Being able to read and write well doesn't just make you employable, it makes you able to enjoy and be satisfied by the things you can do with your own brain - and being reconciled to yourself, and who you are, is one of the first and biggest steps to confidence and a sense of self-worth.
You previously said that the greatest influence on your writing has been life itself. What particular events or times have inspired you and what advice would you offer others seeking inspiration?
I don't think any particular or specific event could be held to have been of distinct influence on my writing. What has been much more powerful has been the steady inexorable effect of daily life, dramas and dullness included. Also very important, all these decades of watching and listening to other people, and to anyone wanting to write fiction, I would say that one of the best things you can do is to train yourself to observe other people with curiosity but without judgement. Humanity is the stuff of fiction, however riveting the storyline, and if the characters aren't credible, a novel will never work.
Much of your work has been adapted for television. Do you think that television and other technology pose a threat to the traditional book?
To my mind, television is a completely different medium to a book, and however well it tells a story, tells it in a totally different way. You are naturally passive when you watch television, but reading a book requires you not just to use your imagination, but also to engage actively with the story and the characters - a much more symbiotic relationship. Personally, I would always rather someone read one of my novels than watched an adaptation - but that doesn't mean I'm not grateful to television for spreading the word!
