‘it Can Feel Quite Mysterious’: Alan Garner On Writing, Folklore And Experiencing Time Slips In The Pennines

At 90, the author reflects on his friendship with Alan Turing, quantum realities and how his grandfather inspired his latest book

Alan Garner is a few days from his 90th birthday when we meet, and his plan for the day itself is “to be very quiet”. He says, “I sound antisocial but I’m not. I’m very sensitive to people and I don’t like more than three or four people in a room at a time.” Since The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, published in 1960, he’s had a long and singular writing life, with a certain amount of gregariousness forced on him by its extraordinary late flowering over the last dozen years.

There was the surprise of a conclusion, half a century on, to those very first children’s fantasy novels: in 2012’s Boneland, the adult Colin seeks answers to childhood mysteries through astronomy, therapy and quantum physics. There was a vivid child’s-eye memoir, Where Shall We Run To?, setting down Garner’s wartime primary school years in rural Cheshire. Three years later he wrote the Booker-shortlisted Treacle Walker, which, in drawing on his childhood as well as local landscape and legend, seemed to distil the whole arc of his literary career into one riddling, playful, dizzyingly deep novella. And now comes Powsels and Thrums, a collection of essays, poetry and short fiction that ranges across his life and work, and showcases “a side of me I’ve used in research that has never appeared until now”.