Marion Turner’s
spellbinding new biography explores the poetry and the adventurous, cosmopolitan
world of the father of English literature. Here she shares with us her thoughts
on Hay Festival.
1. What are you in Hay to talk about?
My new book, Chaucer: A European Life, which is the first major biography of
Chaucer for a generation. It moves away from the traditional idea of Chaucer as
‘father of English literature’ to look instead at his extensive travels around
Europe, his multilingual influences, and the international, even global,
character of city and court in the fourteenth century.
2. What do you want the audience to take away?
I hope people will be surprised,
and will see how innovative and interesting – and un-stuffy – Chaucer was. He
was a fashionable teenager, a prisoner of war, a father, a formally
experimental poet who invented the iambic pentameter, a man who rode across the
Pyrenees in winter, lived through the deposition of a king and the Peasants’
Revolt…all kinds of things that people don’t expect. He crossed borders and
pushed boundaries in so many ways.
3. What’s the best question you’ve been asked
in an event and how did you answer?
In this book, each chapter is a
place or a space, and once someone asked me what other places I might have
included, but didn’t. I really liked this question because it made me think
about the roads not taken, the different shapes the book could have had. So, I
have these shadow-forms in my head of parallel universes in which the book
sculpts Chaucer’s life in other ways.
4. Which events are you looking forward to
seeing?
Bart van Es on The Cut Out Girl, the Leonardo panel, Sophie Ratcliffe on The Lost Properties of Love,
and some fabulous children’s authors with my children – Chris Riddell, Piers Torday, Jessie Burton.
5. If you could sum up Hay Festival up in one
word, it would be…
Creation.
6. What is so special about Hay on Wye?
It creates a world where books
are the centre of things, and everyone living in this world thinks that books
and thinking and talking about ideas are the most fun and wonderful things. You
can do all the best things in life here – buy books, drink wine, walk in
beautiful countryside. And, crucially for me, it is absolutely geared up for
children too, so that the next generation is being encouraged to see the beauty
of a life of books.
7. What was the last book you read and loved?
Emily Wilson’s translation of the
Odyssey.
8. What is the book you’ve most often given as
a gift?
I buy books for children a lot –
and often get them a Diana Wynne Jones book, usually The Lives of Christopher Chant. For grown-ups, recently probably Ali
Smith – The Accidental is my
favourite. She is an extraordinary writer.
9. Which book has most inspired you?
I will never forget the
experience of reading A Room of One’s Own
when I was a teenager; it was a complete awakening for me, about feminism, of
course, and also about the economic and social embeddedness of writing.
10. Which piece of advice do you wish you could
give your 16-year-old self?
Learn more languages.
--
Marion Turner talks Chaucer: A European Life at Hay Festival
Wales on Sunday 26th May. Tickets here. Listen again on Hay Player shortly
after here.