They were simple questions, posed to me during an options evening at school. “Has a poem ever made the hairs on the backs of your arms stand up?” And, “Have you ever read a novel and wondered: ‘How did the author do that?’” If the answer to either of these questions was ‘yes’, I was told, I should consider taking English Literature. I had loved books for as long as I could remember—as a young child I would flout my bedtime to read tales of trusty dogs or gutsy Victorian girls—but had never really considered studying it at A-Level or beyond. Those two straightforward questions made me realise I should.
Thanks to my dedicated teachers at my school in Manchester—shout-out to Nadine West in particular—I was lucky enough to earn a place at Magdalen. I had chosen the college because of its exceptional literary pedigree: Oscar Wilde, who studied there for four years in the 1870s, was one of my favourite writers. (I once tried to write a one-act play in his style. It was dreadful and I sincerely hope it has been lost to time.) I studied English in 2012-15 under the brilliant tutelage of Simon Horobin, Laurie Maguire, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, James McBain and Aditi Nafde.
Naturally I did not love every author we studied, but I often marvelled at their skill and ingenuity. During my degree and after, I have found myself coming back to one of those questions: “How did the author do that?” It all comes down to close reading: scrutinising the decisions, big and small, that every writer must make, and the effect of those decisions on the reader. The attentiveness that was inculcated in me during my time at Oxford is essential in my work today as the Deputy Culture Editor of The Economist. I write reviews and edit articles by others, so spend most of my days thinking about syntax, grammar and word choice.
And, in my work outside The Economist, I get to engage with that question in a more direct way. Alongside Simon Akam—also an Oxford English alumnus, of Worcester college—I co-host Always Take Notes, a podcast for and about writers and writing. I joined the show in late 2019 and since then we have interviewed a host of world-famous novelists, journalists, playwrights, poets, historians and screenwriters, as well as literary agents, editors and publishers. The aim is to demystify the world of writing and to understand how a person can actually make a living in the creative industries.
In each episode, guests tell us how their careers have taken shape: how they, in short, have done it. We cover everything from the prosaic—what is your writing routine? How do you organise your finances?—to the profound. It has been insightful, as well as great fun, to ask Victoria Hislop about her research process, Tina Brown about running the New Yorker and Paula Hawkins about writing twists. We strive for a broad range of guests on the podcast, but eagle-eyed readers will notice that those guests are all Oxford alumnae; we will be interviewing another, Helen Fielding, at the Sheldonian Theatre in November.
We hope that the podcast is genuinely useful for aspirant writers of any age, but especially students who hope to pursue writing after graduation and have little understanding of the world of agents, advances and royalties. In 2023 we collected some of the material we’ve heard into a book, “Always Take Notes: Advice from Some of the World’s Greatest Writers”, and updated it in a new edition in late 2024.
During my time at Oxford, I was encouraged to be curious, think deeply—and read quickly. I shall have to bring all of those traits to bear in my role as a judge of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction this year. It will surely be the most intense reading period of my life since those weeks in a makeshift library on one of Magdalen’s lawns before my finals a decade ago (the actual library was being renovated). I’m hoping to find a book that gives me that hair-raising, wondrous feeling that set me on this path to begin with.
