Alice Hoffman and A. S. Byatt in the News

Alice Hoffman and A. S. Byatt are well-known for their fairy tale and folklore influenced fiction and both have appeared in the news this week.

First Alice Hoffman has an interview in The Jewish Ledger at Q & A with Alice Hoffman. I'm quoting the most pertinent parts here, but the interview is much longer than what I quote here so click on through to read more. Hoffman is perhaps best known for her popular Practical Magic among other best-selling novels.

Q: Is your writing influenced at all by your Jewish background?

A: The Jewish part of me is the storytelling part. I think what caused me to be a writer was being a reader, and I was very influenced by fairy tales. But mostly I was influenced by my grandmother, who came from Russia and lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and then in the Bronx. Her stories were for me the beginning of storytelling. It's interesting that I didn't even realize that in writing the "The Story Sisters" that it's really the grandmothers who are the storytellers - the kind of people who are at the heart of everything. That was really true for me with my grandmother; so that's really where my Jewishness comes from. I remember my grandmother telling me stories of growing up and it really seemed that she was telling me a folktale or a fairy tale, because we would be in New York City and she'd be talking about this place with a river that stayed frozen all year round and there were wolves, etc...and as a child I was just really fascinated by her stories. Much later on she told me that she had wanted to be a writer. My grandfather had actually been a poet - he wrote in Yiddish, so I've never actually read his work, but he was published in the Forward and other places. He wasn't well known, but he was definitely interested in that. I never really knew him, but I knew that about him.

Q: Fairy tales and magic are a theme in several of your books. Can you tell me why that is? Why is that such a strong interest of yours?

A: I was very fascinated with traditional fairy tales and the whole idea that they were really stories that were told from grandmother to grandchildren. That's the tradition of the fairy tale - that they are really stories told by women. Reading them as a child, I always thought that they were very emotionally true in a way that a lot of other children's literature wasn't at that time. But I think that there is the whole Jewish tradition of Jewish folk tales and, reading Singer and reading Kafka, magic is really threaded through the Jewish tradition of fiction.

Next, A. S. Byatt has been shortlist nominated for the Booker Prize in Literature for her novel, The Children's Book. You can read more about this year's shortlist here: Man Booker Prize shortlist announced.

The first of the six novels still in the running for the Booker Prize is A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, which follows a fairy tale writer and her children during the summer before World War One. Olive Wellwood writes a private book for each of her three children (daughters Dorothy and Hedda and son Tom), "bound in a different color and placed on a shelf." Byatt's Possession won the Booker Prize in 1990.

The Children's Book is also supposed to be a gloss of E. Nesbit's life among numerous other influences. Possession has Melusine influences among others and is arguably her most famous novel.