Archive lifts lid on Graham Swift

Swift won the Booker prize in 1996

The British Library has acquired the archive of the Booker Prize-winning novelist Graham Swift.

The collection includes manuscripts, notes, revisions and proofs relating to all eight of his novels - including the Booker-winning Last Orders.

It also contains correspondence with friends and contemporaries including the late poet Ted Hughes, with whom he discusses fishing.

Swift said he was "delighted" the archive would be staying in London.

He said: "I can't think of where it could be better looked after but as I'm a Londoner, it's in every sense ideal.

"I shall always know my manuscripts are just up the road."

Fish traps

The archive includes professional correspondence with friends and colleagues including Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, Pat Barker, Michael Ondaatje and Caryl Phillips.

The Hughes letters include tips for fishing the River Torridge in Devon, together with Hughes' handwritten sketches marking "fish traps" along the river.

Background material relating to the recently published Making an Elephant, is also in the collection.

Among the more unusual items is a tape recording of the answer phone messages Swift received on the night he won the Booker Prize in 1996, including messages from fellow authors congratulating him on his win.

Literary culture

This acquisition is a "major addition" to the British Library's existing collections of contemporary novelists' archives, said Jamie Andrews, head of Modern Literary Manuscripts.

"His rich and well-worked notes and drafts will enable significant insights into Swift's way of working, while the correspondence and non-fiction work reveal much about his biography and position in relation to literary culture and academia," he said.

"There are significant connections with archives the British Library already holds - particularly the recently acquired Ted Hughes archive.

"Hughes' letters to Swift record fishing trips they enjoyed together, that Hughes himself describes in the fishing diaries in his own archive."