If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive--then don't be a writer.

Some of Swift's books have been filmed including Last Orders starring Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins and Waterland starring Jeremy Irons. Swift was acquainted with Ted Hughes and has himself publiGraham Swiftd poetry of note some of which is included in Making an Elephant: Writing from Within (2009). I think in general it’s been a good thing.

Last Orders was joint-winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a mildly controversial winner of the 1996 Booker Prize owing to the superficial similarities in plot to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Born in London England he was educated at Dulwich College London Queens' College Cambridge and later the University of York. Waterland is set in The Fens; a novel of landscape history and family it is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English literature syllabus in British schools.