James Meek
Photo Credit: Sarah Lee
James Meek was born in London in 1962 and grew up in Dundee. We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is his fourth novel. His previous books include Drivetime (1995) and The People’s Act of Love (2005) which won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the SAC Book of the Year Award, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and has been translated into more than twenty languages. He has published two collections of short stories, Last Orders (1992) and The Museum of Doubt (2000), which was shortlisted for a Macmillan Silver Pen award.
He has worked as a journalist since 1985. He now lives in London. His reporting from Iraq and about Guantánamo Bay won a number of British and international awards. In the autumn of 2001 he reported for the Guardian from Afghanistan on the war against the Taliban and the liberation of Kabul.
The Heart Broke In
Shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year Award 2012
James Meek, author of To Calais, In Ordinary Time, writes about the intersections of languages with each other, and with power, at the Guardian:
“The transformation tends to be presented in popular history as an absolute, as the triumph of English over French, as if languages were hermetic national systems, as if English were taken prisoner by French with the Norman conquest in 1066, was tyrannised by it for the next 300 years, then burst free and drove the aggressor back across the Channel. As well as describing, in English, the death of French as a living language in England, Trevisa sounds the death knell for living Latin by the then radical act of translating a learned work from Latin into English.
“But neither French nor Latin went away. They seeped into what we call English and made themselves at home, giving the language its fantastical redundancy, creating something half-Germanic, half-Romance. Trilinguality was internalised. Otherwise the Albert Hall would resound to ‘Land of hope and woolder/Mother of the frith,’ and we’d sing ‘God beery our gladman Queen’ and leave the EU not to take back control but to ‘take wield again’. We’re born in English, live, love, wonder, feel and die in English, but we’re conceived, we emerge, exist, touch, desire, doubt, experience, suffer, succeed, fail and perish in French and Latin.”
Guardian