My guest this week is Harry Parker, a writer and artist who had a very interesting route to becoming an author.
Harry is an army veteran who lost his legs following an IED explosion while on tour in Afghanistan. Several years later and back in the UK, Harry wrote a novel, Anatomy of a Solider, which tells the story of Sergeant Tom Barnes, who also loses his legs in an explosion, through the perspectives of 45 inanimate objects: a gun, a bag of fertiliser, a prosthetic leg, a grieving mother’s handbag and so on. It’s an extraordinary book, disorienting and incredibly moving, and in 2016 when it was published, Harry was featured as one of The Observer's new faces of fiction. the book got rave reviews and won the Waverton Good Read Award the following year. Overall, a pretty incredible experience for a debut novelist.
But his second book did not go so well. It didn’t sell and Harry, who is clearly an extremely resilient guy, is nonetheless very candid here about how personal that rejection felt, and how hard it has been to get over. It’s a great reminder, I think, that writing success is not linear, even for established authors. You have to be prepared for bumps in the road and allow yourself time to accommodate them. Thank you so much to Harry for being so open about it all.
You can find Anatomy of a Soldier and books by my other guests at my online bookstore: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele
You can also find me on Twitter - @francescasteele. Do come along and let me know what you think of the podcast and the authors' experiences.
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