interviews
TLS
Twenty Questions with Lee Rourke
Which author do you think is most overrated? ‘I’d start with Jonathan Franzen, followed by … you know the type’
Full Stop
This year we are interested in the situation of writers, rather than writing, in the subjective experience of writing fiction (or in this case, poetry and criticism), rather than fiction’s responsibilities to respond to a rapidly changing world.
The Guardian
In conversation: Lee Rourke and Tom McCarthy
Lee Rourke, shortlisted online by Guardian readers for our Not the Booker prize, meets Tom McCarthy, shortlisted for the real Man Booker, to talk about Kafka, Twitter and causing controversy
3am Magazine
The Quietus
Tim Burrows heads down to the coast to meet with author Lee Rourke and discuss his latest novel, Vulgar Things, the ways in which we filter the world and the strange allure and twin personalities of Southend and Canvey Island.
Vol. 1 Brooklyn
Lee Rourke’s new novel Glitch opens with its protagonist returning home to England to deal with a family crisis. En route, his flight encounters a bizarre mechanical failure, segueing into a harrowing sequence of in-flight chaos. That’s only the beginning of an emotionally wrenching period for the novel’s hero, as he wrangles with troubled relationships, the specter of mortality, and a world that no longer works the way it should.
Gorse
An interview with Lee Rourke by Liam Jones.
Lee Rourke’s work is difficult to summarise, because to summarise it would be to misrepresent it. By exposing the fissure in reality Rourke demonstrates the fallibility of language. Language in Rourke’s novels always seems like an effacement of reality. Despite this his work articulates with clarity a certain loss of meaning in contemporary neoliberal culture.
Totally Dublin
“I’m obsessed with the writings of Jacques Derrida and with the poet Francis Ponge, in particular a work of his called Soap, where he treats poetry as if it were an experiment in a laboratory. He wants to approach the event of the object through language and its cleansing”
Book Slut
What does boredom mean? What path can boredom take us down? I recently had the pleasure of interviewing him via email, after hosting him for an event at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Rourke is a charming man who also happens to be extremely intelligent and (surprise!) well-read. We spoke about boredom, swans, canals, and mythology.
minor literature[s]
Know Your Place: An Interview With Lee Rourke and Sam Mills
Know Your Place is a crowdfunded anthology from Dead Ink books, which provides a platform for 24 working class authors to discuss the impact of social class on their lives and writing. Conceived as a response to media coverage of the EU Referendum, in which the working class was portrayed as insular, backward-looking and monocultural, Know Your Place is a diverse snapshot of modern Britain, viewed through a literary lens.
HTMLGIANT
Catherine Lacey interviews lee Rourke
“There are many myths interwoven throughout the simple narrative of The Canal, most notably Leda and the Swan, and an element of Cassandra within the woman on the bench, too – I even see the nefarious gang of youths who haunt the canal banks and the narrator from day to day as a Greek chorus of sorts. Albeit, a rather ramshackle one.”
Bookmunch
‘I fear a future of digitised, mobile snippets of knowledge, summaries and bullet points’ – Steve Finbow interviews Lee Rourke
review 31
I talked to to Nathan Connolly, Lee Rourke and Gena-mour Barrett about their new book, Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class by the Working Class, a compendium of articles by working class writers published by independent press Dead Ink. Attempting to redress the middle class bias of contemporary publishing, Know Your Place offers insights into class in modern Britain from a range of writers including minority, LGBT and ‘post-austerity’ perspectives.
Litro USA
“I’ve never fallen in love with a literary character, nor could I. There are characters I have obsessed over. But, you know. I’m sorry, I don’t know how to answer this question. I could go with it, to be entertaining, but it wouldn’t feel right. So, again, I’ll risk both you and the reader thinking I’m a pretentious arse… I’m not.”
Vulpres Libris
Lee and I have come to Bar Italia in Soho on a cold Thursday evening. This is the sixth attempt that we have made to meet but the first that has been successful. He is the younger side of thirty something, with closely cropped blonde hair and beard. There must be periods when the cutting and trimming are coordinated to create a uniform fuzzy-blonde ball with eyes, nose and a mouth. Not unlike a cat, the interviewer thinks but does not say.
Necessary Fiction
When I write I read as much fiction as possible, so the good stuff naturally seeps into my writing. Nothing is original so I’m not worried about what does or doesn’t seep in. For The Canal I was reading a lot of Heidegger and lots of French stuff like Derrida. Fiction-wise I’m inspired by writers such as Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Deborah Levy and Gwendoline Riley. But it could be anyone really, anyone I happen to be reading.
The Paris Bitter Hearts Pit
I once, during my summer holidays aged 15, worked in an umbrella factory in Manchester. My working day consisted of knocking the tips of the umbrella on with a piece of clumsy metal; it had tape wrapped around one end that served as a handle (the result of a previous worker no doubt). I got paid for how many I did in a day (which wasn’t many). The bloke next to me (he was called Douglas) had been doing that job for 25 years. If I learnt one thing that summer it was that life for most people is pretty rubbish, boring, and mundane.
dogmatika
Purposely Resisting All That
Since 2004, as editor of the on-line literary site Scarecrow, Lee Rourke has made it his business to “bang the drum for the unheard, the unconventional, the eccentric, the revolutionary and the radical”, turning his back on “the mainstream bookish blatherskites” and championing “misunderstood, ignored and abandoned underground and independent literary fiction and culture.”
3AM Magazine
Non-Working Doing its Work: An Interview With Hendrik Wittkopf & Lee Rourke
“I first saw some of Hendrik’s paintings at an exhibition some time ago and was immediately struck by their layers of intensity. I visited his studio to look at more of his work and when we began talking about art and literature we seemed to share the same ideas. I tackle the writing process in the same way Hendrik approaches his paintings. So, it just kind of made sense to do something together.”
3AM Magazine
Psychogeography: Merlin Coverley
Lee Rourke interviews Merlin Coverley.
The word “Psychogeography” seems to be on everyone’s lips at the moment, so embedded is it in national cultural lexicon.