Before he became a published fiction writer, Sam Thompson was teaching in Oxford, where he completed his PhD on Renaissance literature. Born and bred in Hertfordshire, Thompson had taken his undergraduate degree at Trinity College Dublin, pursuing the “literary romance” of a family connection (his grandfather studied there in the 1920s, with Samuel Beckett, a schoolfriend from their Portora days). For many an English literature graduate, tenure at an Oxbridge college would be a dream come true. However, standing up in front of students every day, Thompson was increasingly aware that “academic culture didn’t really suit me”. Luckily, he had other options.
While pursuing his thesis on William Shakespeare, Thompson was publishing short book reviews in prestigious publications like the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. Those short 500 word pieces had been enough to attract the attention of a literary agent, who suggested that Thompson should get in touch if he ever decided to write a book. Looking for an escape route from academia, Thompson started to knit together fragments of short fiction he had been working on for almost a decade. The agent’s response was not exactly promising. “[He thought] it looked pretty unpublishable, but that there was one editor he knew who it might work for.” And he was right. Thompson’s “weird fragments” would become Communion Town, “an odd little experimental thing” that would be praised as “a dazzling debut” (the New York Times), a “vividly depicted dystopia” (the Washington Independent Review of Books), and “playful and compelling” (the Telegraph).
It wasn’t just reviewers who loved it. Communion Town was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012. Although his Booker journey ended there, Thompson was so delighted by the nomination that he climbed a fence with his pregnant wife to get into a party organised to celebrate the shortlist he did not make. “I was the only non-shortlisted author who’d turned up,” he recalls, “because apparently all the others had more sense and better things to do ... but when were we ever going to get to go to that kind of thing again?”
Describing his journey into literary life more than a decade later, Thompson acknowledges that “it all feels very frictionless, like a big stroke of luck, and it was”. But it also felt somehow inevitable, in a way that many the circumstances of his evolving grown-up life did. Why did Thompson study English literature at college? “I was a swot in English at school and it just seemed self-evident to me that there was something important and meaningful to it, so it was an obvious choice that I would want to carry on reading and writing about books.” Why did he start reviewing? “It just seemed important to me – in the way everything seems important when you are in your 20s, maybe – but it mattered to write those reviews. I must have felt there was something that mattered in the world around books and responding to books, and I still agree with myself.” Why did he begin to write fiction? “It wasn’t conscious, really, but there was this unexamined idea in my mind of what I thought was important and I probably wouldn’t have said fiction was important but I was doing it, I suppose, because I thought it was.”
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Speaking from his office at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast, where he now teaches on the creative writing programme, a discipline more suited to his temperament, Thompson still clearly believes in the centrality of the written word to the world and his own understanding of it. His latest book, The Forest Yet to Come, has just been published and it explores a central theme that has recurred in his work in the intervening years since Communion Town, whether that is in his 2018 novel Jott, which was inspired by his grandfather’s schoolboy friendship with Beckett; his fantastical short stories, collected in 2023′s Whirlwind Romance; or the trilogy of children’s books that began in 2022 with Wolfstongue and comes to its conclusion in The Forest Yet to Come.
The Wolfstongue saga began for Thompson when one of his children was experiencing difficulties with speech, a challenge that would eventually lead to a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. His son, now 12, “seemed to be struggling with the ways that language could mean different things. Working out how to articulate himself to the world and other people was something that was quite challenging for him at that time”. Wolfstongue, a powerful fable about a selectively mute boy who finds communion in the forest behind his house, and his voice in defence of the wolves he befriends, was a direct response to the circumstances of his family’s life.
Writing it, however, was also a journey of discovery for Thompson himself. “When you are a parent, you find yourself very aware of the ways in which your younger self understood the world, in a way that you wouldn’t have known at the time,” he says. “It became much more obvious to me, looking at my own kids, that language was actually quite challenging for me when I was small, and I wasn’t aware of it at the time. So I think part of the impulse for writing for me, for working with language on the page, was that it was a place where language would do what you wanted it to, a magic space where all potential that you intuit in language can be released, where words can be as complex and balanced and connected as they can be, but never seem to be when you are speaking.”
While Thompson is aware that he probably wouldn’t have written the Wolfstongue books without these personal circumstances of parenting his son, he doesn’t really think of them as books for children. “I really don’t think there is a distinction to be made between writing for adults and writing for children,” he explains. “I understand why people would think it is a generic shift or a modal, formal shift, and I am aware that there is an idea that one might entertain that children’s books are an interlude for a writer, or something less important [in their catalogue], but I am deadly serious about those books. Writing literary fiction feels a much more frivolous and playful enterprise. [The three Wolfstongue books] are the most ambitious and intently meant books that I have written.
“That is partly because writing for a child reader there is a special urgency to it,” he continues, “and maybe I am contradicting myself by saying that, but you can’t afford to waste time. The things we have to talk about to eight-year-olds and 10-year-olds are too important for messing around. So the more I have worked on them, the more I believe that there is no distinction between my books from the writer’s side of things. You only get one life as a writer and every book you write finds a place on that path, so the Wolfstongue books are part of the same progression that comes from Communion Town, or my short stories, or from Jott.” Indeed, that latter book seems to share some of the same preoccupations with speech and language as the first Wolfstongue book does. Consider Arthur, Thompson’s grandfather’s alter ego, observing Louis the famously taciturn Beckett’s stand-in: “Every conversation was the better for being unhad, because silence was more exacting than speech and more truly communicative.”
Thompson also sees a shared line of influence in all his books that comes straight from his research as a Renaissance literature scholar. Communion Town paid deliberate tribute to its shaping force on his imagination by way of its epigraph, which drew from the prologue to the ancient Roman comedy Menaechmi by Paluatus, which itself is best known as the Latin source for Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. More obliquely, but no less importantly, Thompson says, the world of the Wolfstongue trilogy draws on “the spirit of The Tempest”, Shakespeare’s famous romance. “That might sound like a pompous thing to say,” he laughs, “but the books that are important to you come out in what you write.”
That “world and spirit” are the wildness of the forests where the Wolfstongue series unfolds, a liminal space where the human and natural world come into conflict with each other, and nature’s enchantments are both dangerous and benign. The forest is “a sort of magic space, where normal time doesn’t happen,” he says. “Instead there’s a sort of dream time or a folk story time, and the animal characters are living in an eternal present.”
Despite being conceived as the final instalment of a trilogy, Thompson says The Forest Yet to Come differs significantly from the earlier books: “Well it’s not set in the talking animal world, and the characters are predominantly human. There are two children, siblings, who are main characters, and they live in this sort of utopian idyllic village where all their needs are filled by nature spirits called shapes. The siblings want to know what is outside the walls and Reynard, the fox who is the antagonist of the previous two stories, appears and disrupts everything.”
While the books do “sort of loop into each other”, Thompson wasn’t preoccupied by giving the reader that much of an overlap. “I suppose I was thinking of the kind of broad fantastical span of other trilogies, old favourites of mine, like Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea or Alan Garner’s Tales of Alderley, which showed me how far you could leap in the course of a trio of books, how once you get to the third book you can do some quite weird stuff and get to quite a strange place.”
The echoes of those childhood favourites lingering in his grown-up mind remind him again of how, “in the ways that matter most, all the writing is one continuous pathway”.
“One example of this was that, while writing the wolf-and-fox books, I was also working on a grown-up novel about several generations of a family, and about what it means for our future to become our children’s present. I couldn’t make that book work, and I think one reason was that I was already telling that story in the children’s trilogy,” Thompson says.
“Now I’m working on another grown-up novel,” he concludes, bringing our circuitous conversation to a close, “which I suspect grows in turn from some elements of the Wolfstongue books that I haven’t yet understood.”
The Forest Yet to Come is published by Little Island
