Most Read... Rebecca WattsThe Cult of the Noble Amateur
(PN Review 239)
John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Tim Parksin conversation with Natalia Ginzburg
(PN Review 49)
Next Issue Hal Coase 'Ochre Pitch' Gregory Woods 'On Queerness' Kirsty Gunn 'On Risk! Carl Phillips' Galina Rymbu 'What I Haven't Written' translated by Sasha Dugdale Gabriel Josipovici 'No More Stories' Valerie Duff-Strautmann 'Anne Carson's Wrong Norma'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
PN Review 275
PN Review Substack

This interview is taken from PN Review 46, Volume 12 Number 2, November - December 1985.

in Conversation with Norman Nicholson David Wright

David Wright - You were born in this house in Millom, and in the opening chapter of your autobiography, 'Wednesday Early Closing', you remark, 'I feel that I have lived at this address since before I was born.' What did you mean by that?


Norman Nicholson - My father moved into this house about 1903, eighty years ago. I was born ten years later. To a certain extent I feel it had been my home for ten years before I was born. The street was built about 1880 - a street of bow-windowed houses and little tiny gardens, as the outer suburb of a small growing town. But very quickly, I think within ten years of having been built, half the houses had been changed into shops. And I feel that I've come into this street, which was changing as the town changed, as the town developed, as the era changed, that in a way I've lived in this house since it was built.


In the same chapter you also say, 'It's not just that the past persists into the present: the present pushes back the past.' Your grandparents came to Millom in 1867 when the town was just beginning to be built round the new ironworks, which were dismantled only a few years ago. So what with your grandparents' reminiscences and the seventy years you have lived in Millom, you have been a witness to the rise and decline of ...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image