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Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs

Three years ago, the writer and academic David Shields published Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, New York, 2010), half written by other authors. The book condemned the current state of fiction, and urged writers to collapse boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. Shields argued abandoning ‘imagination’ was the only way forward. In his review of Reality Hunger in The Guardian, the novelist Blake Morrison argued Shields’s book was simply a ‘manifesto in 618 soundbites’. Morrison argued that the power of imagination will always be best suited to making sense of the real world. Several British writers had been pursuing an agenda along the lines of Reality Hunger already, namely Gordon Burn, author of Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel and most notably David Peace, ‘faction’ author of The Damned United, a book which seeks the ‘truth’ of real lives using the tools of fiction.

In this work, I am seeking to blend the strongest aspects of both the fictional and non-fictional world. My novel is a response to David Shields, David Peace and Gordon Burn, but rejecting the idea that either pure fiction or pure non-fiction is the way forward. In my satire of English Premiership football (a fake footballer but part of a real team, in a real point in history), I am seeking to forge an original path, using the context of real life but the tools of fiction to display what Picasso famously called that elusive ‘greater truth’. My book was widely praised for being an original take on the contemporary sporting world, but which also showed how the real world can bite back – the major Ryan Giggs scandal of 2011 gave the book a new life by giving it a new context.