Creative non-fiction and J.M. Coetzee

Mark Gomes

Last week ABR received a query from two Mentone schoolgirls regarding the newly announced Young Calibre Prize. What exactly, they asked, was ‘creative non-fiction’, as referred to in our media release? Google told them ‘non-fiction’ was writing based on facts, so wasn’t our barrelled genre descriptor impossible by definition? Could we please explain the confusion so they might enter this lucrative young writers’ prize.

The term, we replied, was intended to encourage imaginative approaches to the non-fiction genre, and writing that addresses lived experience while informed by personal reflection. We might have substituted the word ‘essay’ for the kind of artful ‘non-fiction’ intended, but felt its overtones of dry obligation in the educational context uninspiring. The task was to tell a compelling true story, or to shape lived experience into narrative.

‘Creative non-fiction’, as a label, has been parlance since the 1970s. Famous early works in the genre include George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Capote perhaps explained the form best as writing ‘using all the apparatus of a fiction artist on a journalistic subject’: a device that now seems commonplace in both print and online publishing.

Perhaps couching our terms of entry to students in the context of blog publishing – where personal inflection in writing is expected, and public meanings are commonly debated at length – would have helped. Equal parts personal publishing heaven and hell, the web overflows with varying quality creative non-fiction; including memoir, unorthodox biography, food and travel writing, literary journalism, and other hybridised essay forms.

More tellingly, growing favour for the form is observable at the forefront of sanctioned literary publishing. The third volume of J.M. Coetzee’s ‘fictionalised autobiography’, Summertime, has just been included on this year’s Booker Prize longlist. In it, Coetzee has friends recount his life through a series of interviews after his death. ‘Those hoping to find the historical record tallying with the fictional record will be disappointed’, the author has remarked.

Entries in the Young Calibre Prize, worth $3000, and the Fourth Calibre Prize for Outstanding Essay, worth $10,000, are now invited. Entry forms and media releases for both competitions are available on the ABR website. James Ley writes at length about J.M. Coetzee and Summertime in the September issue of ABR. The magazine offers giveaway copies of Summertime to new subscribers in September, with thanks to Random House.