He wanted to hear himself more than he wanted to hear me, and the crowd picked up on it. His point of view wasn’t wrong but just so narrow. I could be wrong, but we started off… off. You need something mutual – we never had that. What matters to me is the sincerity of the interviewer. I don’t know, it was fine my wife thought it was great. I have watched you in interviews, flinching at questions…Īnd I’ve just read about the interview at the Sydney writers’ festival, which made headlines as a fiasco for interviewer Michael Cathcart. I am trying to be new – it is a “novel”, right? The hardest thing doing interviews is that you run into a wall of expectations. I’m trying to look beyond expectations of what a black book is supposed to be. One thing that was nice was that one guy wrote about me as a Jewish writer. It was good – the reviews I especially liked are ones where people gave up the review format to say what they have to say.

What kind of a critical response did The Sellout get in the US? Or maybe a place exists but I have not yet found it. Is it that I don’t want to be placed? I don’t know… maybe. If it is my job, I cannot do it in a word… No… but I don’t think of myself as a satirist. Writing is a struggle, full of weird contradictions.Īs a satirist, do you think there is anything that ought to be satire-proof? I am fortunate in having found something I enjoy, even though I hate doing it too. I was affected by what you said when you received the Booker prize – you were visibly moved yourself – about writing having given you a life… I tend to like underappreciated characters: you think you see one thing, you might be seeing something else. But the real seed for the book was the character of Hominy.

I have a pretty good sense of direction, although I don’t know how I’m going to get there. I was asking myself: how do you segregate something without having any power? I was intrigued to try to figure it out.

I started with the idea of rendering segregation in a contemporary context. When you started The Sellout, to what extent did you know where you were going with it?

He lives in New York and teaches creative writing at Columbia University. In 2016, he became the first American to win the Booker prize with his fourth novel, The Sellout, a coruscating bestseller about race relations in the US. He started his writing career as a poet and has edited Hokum, a study in African American humour. He studied psychology at Boston University and received an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College. P aul Beatty was born in Los Angeles in 1962.

Paul beatty's the sellout