WRITER PROFILE

Theo Dorgan travels to the Kilkenny Arts Festival to talk to Richard Ford ('Independence Day', 'The Sportswriter', 'Women with Men'), the man credited with creating the "dirty realism" school of American fiction, about his life and work.

Ford is widely credited with being one of the finest practitioners of the short story around and his masterful novels which delve deeply into the soul of modern America and the life of the ordinary, often forgotten men and women who populate it make for powerful, if poignant reading.

In a wide-ranging interview, Ford humorously defines the range of his work and what he is trying to articulate about the human condition. Strenuously insisting that his characters never get away from him in his books and that any writer who says otherwise is a fool or a liar, he reveals where his ideas have come from and how he works hard to turn them into believable stories and characters.

Ford offers a frank assessment of the state of the short story about which he feels passionately. Though full of Southern charm, in the interview he explains how hard he has tried to get away from the tag of being a "Southern writer" and how he hopes that his work encompasses the whole world of experience of men and women everywhere.


Biographical Details

Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944.

His first novel, 'A Piece of My Heart', was runner-up for the Ernest Hemingway Award in 1976 and was described by The Times as "quality writing in the highest American tradition of Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck".

This was followed by a taut thriller, 'The Ultimate Good Luck', described by Stanley Elkin as "so hardboiled and tough that it might have been written on the back of a trenchcoat. A grand Maltese Falcon of a novel", and by Newsweek as "the work of a formidably talented novelist".

His next book was 'The Sportswriter', his first to be published in Britain by Harvill in 1986, and the book which was to affect a whole decade of writers and readers. Harvill swiftly brought the two earlier novels into print in Britain and followed these with his exquisite short novel 'Wildlife' ("A fine novel by a fine writer" wrote Salman Rushdie).

In 1995, Richard Ford was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his sequel to 'The Sportswriter', 'Independence Day'. It was the first time a single novel had won both awards.

Richard Ford is also one of America's finest short-story writers. His 1988 collection Rock Springs was described in the Sunday Times as "a collection of stunning impact . . . which marks Ford's arrival at the pinnacle of his craft".

In 1997, he confirmed his mastery of shorter fiction with the publication of a new collection, 'Women with Men'.


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Running Time: 30mins
Year Made: 2000
Price: €20 - PAL (European), €30 - NTSC (US) plus P&P