Samantha Harvey
Samantha Harvey
Samantha Harvey, is an English author. She completed the Bath Spa Creative Writing MA course in 2005, and has also completed a postgraduate course in philosophy and a PhD in Creative Writing. Her first novel is The Wilderness, a book about the unravelling effect of Alzheimer's disease. Her second novel, All Is Song, is a novel about moral and filial duty, and about the choice between questioning and conforming...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionYouTube Star
Date of Birth30 May 1993
CityIpswich, England
We see book-burning as a crime against humanity: it's intolerable because books represent a kind of freedom to us.
The sense of one's past is so strong and forms our sense of self so strongly, it will always fascinate, elude and confuse me.
As the U.S., much of Europe, and the U.K. shift toward the political right, the rhetoric grows more insular, defensive, and protective.
Common perceptions of female friendships are morning coffees discussing children, bags, periods and agreeing about the misdemeanours of men... mild, soft, nurturing relationships.
Down on the ground, we seem to do anything but make lengthy, robust monologues. We can communicate in an instant almost anywhere. Gone is the slow old letter - itself a monologue, a sort of considered performance of best self - and in its place is the e-mail, the text, the SMS, the tweet.
One of the most unsettling things about 'Monologue' is its long silences, in which the man sits alone, staring into the middle distance, without grip of his narrative, lost to the past.
One of the things the novel can do is address big questions in ways that are accessible to people. It's not that I want to teach people, but these are the things that interest me, and this is my medium for exploring ideas, and I think the potential of novels to do that is massive.
Monologues are self-verifying and self-referencing, a world in their own right, one with its own internal logic that strengthens with reiteration.
When there's change, and people fear things, they become more dogmatic in their views. They lash out: you can see it in the media, scapegoating and penal sentencing.
The past is open to all sorts of magical possibilities because it can't be verified. It's as we make it, so it seems to be entirely free. It seems to be completely up for grabs. But of course it's not.
With 'All Is Song,' I tried to construct a very traditional narrative that pulls no tricks.
There are many ways to go about a story. And if you give yourself some formal constraints, it just makes the job so much - maybe 'easier' isn't the right word, but because you know your boundaries, you can just play within those boundaries much more, so it's much more fun to do.
It's quite difficult to write about female friendship without it seeming to be a very niche subject. It's a difficult balance.
We use the same possessive pronouns for everything, but do we own our lives or sisters or husbands in the same way we own our shoes? Do we own any of them at all?