AJ Kirby by AJ Kirby

 

If you have been following us here at The State of the Arts, last Monday saw the fourth and final part of AJ Kirby’s ‘Cow and Calf’ posted on the site – click HERE to read the full story.

AJ Kirby is the author of the novels When Elephants walk through the Gorbals, Paint this Town Red, Bully, Perfect World and Sharkways. His short fiction has been published across the web, and in magazines, anthologies and literary journals, as well as in three collections: Trickier & Treatier, The Art of Ventriloquism and Mix Tape.

He was one of 20 Leeds-based authors under 40 shortlisted in 2013 for the LS13 competition and his novel Paint this Town Red was shortlisted for 2012’s The Guardian Not the Booker prize.

All of his books are available for purchase on his Amazon Author Page.

He reviews fiction for The New York Journal of Books and The Short Review.

His official website is here: http://www.andykirbythewriter.20m.com/ and he blogs here: http://paintthistownred.wordpress.com/

 

The State of the Arts now brings you a unique* interview with AJ Kirby, interviewed by…well…himself…

 

*  When I say unique I mean almost unique: Richard Smyth set the ball rolling with this malarkey back in June…

 

Hello there Andrew… or should I call you AJ? Or is it Andy?

Hi. Any of the above will do, although Andrew tends to be my ‘telling-off’ name (and also the one I use for my sportswriting) and AJ makes me sound American (as in Tony Soprano’s son: interestingly I have recently undergone AJ’s remarkable transformation from fat kid to skinny lad… only in reverse). I’m not fond of AJ at all actually, though I’m stuck with it for my fiction work as that’s the name I was first published under – I thought it made me sound more professional, more like Rowling (JK) – and I need to stay faithful to the brand.

Really? You call yourself a brand?

Erm… Yes, it does make me sound all kinds of pretentious now I’ve seen it in print… And a bit weird too, but so’s talking to yourself. First sign of madness, I hear (or is that hairy palms?). OK I’ll put it differently. I need to differentiate between my sportswriting and my fiction-writing and so I use different names just in case someone picks up one of my sports books expecting a ginormous monster to rear up in the first chapter… Actually, my first sports book was about Alex Ferguson, so maybe monster would be right… And the one I’m writing at the moment is about Louis van Gaal, he of the “golden willy” (according to Arjen Robben), and that’s all kinds of monstrous.

You write your sports books about Manchester United… and yet you live in Leeds and were proud to be listed as one of the top 20 Leodian writers under 40 during last year’s Big Bookend. How does that tally up? Leeds and Manchester have a famously prickly relationship.

Ah, well that’s another reason for the branding stuff. I’m from Manchester… hence the United alliegance… But I’ve actually lived in Leeds for longer than I ever did across the Pennines. On a side-note my Dad was very keen for me to be born in Yorkshire in order that I could play county cricket for them (at the time they still had the archaic rule that you had to have been born here to play for the county). I wasn’t. Apparently it was the one and only row my Mum and Dad ever had. But Yorkshire-ness has skipped a generation. My son, Leon, was born right here in Leeds on Christmas Day 2013, and although he doesn’t need to have been born here to play for the county any more, if you’ve ever tried to join a Yorkshire cricket club with a Lancastrian accent, you know these things do still count. I only joined the cricket club for cheap weekend booze, but I don’t think I’d have been accepted as a member had Leon not been present, cooing and looking cute (and Yorkshire).

Talking of your sports books, one’s just been published hasn’t it?

I’m glad you asked me that, Andrew/AJ/Andy. Yes, yes it has. ‘The Pride of all Europe’ was released last week – to much fanfare. ‘The Pride of All Europe’ celebrates Manchester United’s triumphs in European football, concentrating on ten key stories from the twenty-five seasons and six decades the club has participated in the Europe’s premier competition, interspersed with brief, first-hand fan accounts of those fabled United “Euroaways.” You can buy the book from amazon.co.uk

But United aren’t even in the Champions League next season are they? Haven’t even made it to Thursday nights-Channel Five UEFA Cup ignominy, have they?

Nope… But that should help it sell better. In a ‘remember the good times’ kind of way. Incidentally, the first football book, Fergie’s Finest, was coincidentally published the very week Fergie announced his retirement and as such sales rocketed. It was lucky – in terms of my writing – though terrible news for the team as a whole.

Oh. Can’t we talk about something else other than football?

Okay, let’s talk about your fiction. ‘Cow and Calf’ is as good a place as any to start, seeing as though it featured in these very pages.

Okay. ‘Cow and Calf’ is a supernatural tale of madness, motherhood, and revenge. Set on the wild Yorkshire moorland near Ilkley, it is the story of one mother’s desperate attempts to reconcile herself with the (ghostly) child who was taken from her many years ago. The Cow and Calf – also known as Hangingstone Rocks – are two monoliths of millstone grit which look out upon the seemingly idyllic town of Ilkley, a place which has stored up a wealth of terrible memories, particularly in its treatment of our less than fortunate mother, who returns to the rocks again and again in order to try and find a way back into the past, to the moment her child was taken away from her.

The story is also an interesting linguistic experiment. I wanted to write the whole thing in as near as dammit to the dialect of the famous ‘On Ilkla Moor Bah’T’at’ song, but without making it utterly incomprehensible. An early draft featured so many ‘t’s’ and ‘tut’s’ instead of ‘the’s’ that it read like an extended joke. So I thought about how Yorkshire folk talk and those almost non-existent ‘the’s’ that I decided the best way of presenting this was actually to remove all traces of the word ‘the’ in the story. Or, in t’story if you’d prefer. I’m actually rather proud of the end result.

Whatever, Trevor. You tell me the story is a supernatural tale involving madness and revenge. Aren’t all your stories like that?

Well… not exactly. But my first novel – Bully – definitely was. It came out through good old northern publishers Wild Wolf Publishing in 2008 and most definitely was a supernatural tale of revenge from beyond the grave. But it was so much more than that. It was a study of post-traumatic stress, an excoriating examination of bullying within the armed forces. It was a…

You’ve gone off on one now, haven’t you?

Yes. I suppose I have. And really, it’s up to the reader to decide what the book’s about. And the book did get a broadly decent number of readers and a decent amount of good reviews too.

As did the follow-up, Paint this town Red.

Yes and no. In terms of popularity, PTTR did very well. But critically… I think the League of Gentlemen meets Jaws schtick of it was rather too much for some. Still, it did get nominated for the Guardian’s Not the Booker prize.

One book which definitely isn’t a supernatural tale of revenge from beyond the grave is The Magpie Trap. Tell us about that.

You’re right. There are no supernatural elements within that book at all. The Magpie Trap is a modern morality tale, written with no little humour. It’s about the dark side of the mid-to-late 90’s financial boom. Set in the city of Leeds, this action-packed tale is an excoriating commentary on allowing money to rule your life…

Here’s the blurb: Danny Morris wakes up on the sofa with the furred-tongue and pounding headache of a serious hangover. On the coffee table is the sorry evidence of the previous night’s festivities; the mostly empty bottle of whisky, the overflowing ashtray and the greasy pizza box. There’s something else there too; the bag of money, loot from one of the most audacious heists undertaken in modern times.

Right. So what about future publications? Anything new in the offing?

Yes. Thanks for asking. I’ve got two genre fiction books coming out in the near future. First, my 2011 novel Perfect World is being re-released with all-new cover art, by my US publishers TWB Press. Then I have a novella named (and get ready for this, it’s a mouthful): ‘The Rabble-Rousing Rhetoric and Propagandist Imagery of the Nu-Gen Government Under Mace Clark’ coming out through South African publishers Fox and Raven, in early August.

 

Here’s the back-cover blurb to whet your appetite:

You know that faceless, nameless security guard you just riddled with bullets in your favourite shoot ‘em up? You don’t, do you? He matters to you not one iota. But he knows you. He’s been waiting, the pixels of him blending in with those of the digitally-generated furniture. And now he’s angry. He doesn’t want to be the concluding image of an all-Earth hero’s power play. He wants to be more; he wants to mean more. And not just in relation to the good guy, Mace Clark.

Meet Carruthers. By night he lurks amongst the Bine Towers which control knowledge and information. By day he frequents the worst kind of gin-joints along the gutter-like basement levels. And in between he dreams of revenge for the humiliation Mace Clark has rained down upon his head.

 

This action-packed, politically-charged text explores the shades of good and evil, and the dangers of propaganda and imagery. When communication becomes so short-hand as to boil a man down to a comedy meme, what is it we lose?

 

Sounds great.

You would say that!

Anyway, the US and South Africa. You international jet-setter, you.

Ah, we live in a connected world these days, don’t we? Unfortunately the publishing companies haven’t actually paid my air-fare to bring me out to those places in order to sign the contracts or anything like that.

That sounds suspiciously like a moan… Let’s move on. What do you do when you’re not writing books of one sort or another?

Not a moan at all. I’ve done a lot of travelling in my time, but now I’m very much a homeboy. When I’m not working, I look after my son, Leon. I read… when I can. I enjoy films, but haven’t eaten a whole one since Leon was born: no time. I watch box-sets. Loads of them: Breaking Bad is my current weakness. Don’t tell me how it ends.

I won’t. I’ve watched as much as you have.

That’s OK. Anything else you’d like to add?

I’d just like to thank TSOTA for serializing ‘Cow and Calf’ in the first place and getting my work ‘out there’. It’s been a pleasure to work with you guys. Thank you.

 

AJ Kirby’s forthcoming novella, The Rabble-Rousing Rhetoric and Propagandist Imagery of the Nu-Gen Government Under Mace Clark, is published by Fox and Raven this year. The Pride of all Europe is published by Endeavour Press.