A regular feature we hope to have here on the Chapters blog is ‘Five Questions with...’, a series of mini-interviews with writers and others in the book business. To start us off, we sent our Five Questions to bestselling Scottish author Iain Banks, famous for both his mainstream literary fiction, and for his science fiction featuring The Culture, which he writes under the name of Iain M Banks. So, over to Iain...
1) What are you working on at the moment?
Tomorrow's hangover! (Thank you for starting with the easy ones first.)
2) Who's the best new writer you've come across recently?
Still David Mitchell and Alan Warner.
3) Do you have any peculiar rituals you do before you start writing?
Not really. I do find that several months of fairly intensive forward planning (as though there is such a thing as backward planning) helps though.
4) What's the best thing you've written?
This. Definitely. I retain all film rights, yah? Talk to my people.
5) If you could be anything else in the world, except a writer, what would it be?
A Culture GSV*. Or GCU**. I'm not fussy.
* General Systems Vehicle
** General Contact Unit
And there you have it. Iain Banks’s next book will be Transition, published by Little Brown, which will be available September 2009.
For more information about Iain, visit his website.
[Padraig]
