Samantha Harvey
Samantha Harvey
Samantha Harvey, is an English author. She completed the Bath Spa Creative Writing MA course in 2005, and has also completed a postgraduate course in philosophy and a PhD in Creative Writing. Her first novel is The Wilderness, a book about the unravelling effect of Alzheimer's disease. Her second novel, All Is Song, is a novel about moral and filial duty, and about the choice between questioning and conforming...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionYouTube Star
Date of Birth30 May 1993
CityIpswich, England
I think we often live at a surface level, and that ends up with us in a lot of difficulty because we just function on assumptions and secondhand knowledge.
What I always liked about Socrates was his insistence on questioning things for the sake of reaching some sort of clarity - even if it is only clarity about the gaps in our knowledge.
My sister is my sister regardless - has always been and always will be and has no choice about it. This is a love quite distinct from that of a lover, with whom we fall in love, in part, because they are free and have a choice.
With 'All Is Song,' I tried to construct a very traditional narrative that pulls no tricks.
There are many ways to go about a story. And if you give yourself some formal constraints, it just makes the job so much - maybe 'easier' isn't the right word, but because you know your boundaries, you can just play within those boundaries much more, so it's much more fun to do.
The past is open to all sorts of magical possibilities because it can't be verified. It's as we make it, so it seems to be entirely free. It seems to be completely up for grabs. But of course it's not.
When we fall in love, we feel that this person is ours and we are theirs by our mutual volition, and we know they could leave - we know that because they are free, and their freedom is part of the thrill.
With twenty six letters, you can create anything you like - any person, any world, any place, any emotion. And they are so potent, so powerful, and at the same time, they're marks on the page, and that's all. There's nothing else to them.
As the U.S., much of Europe, and the U.K. shift toward the political right, the rhetoric grows more insular, defensive, and protective.
One of the most unsettling things about 'Monologue' is its long silences, in which the man sits alone, staring into the middle distance, without grip of his narrative, lost to the past.
One of the things the novel can do is address big questions in ways that are accessible to people. It's not that I want to teach people, but these are the things that interest me, and this is my medium for exploring ideas, and I think the potential of novels to do that is massive.
When there's change, and people fear things, they become more dogmatic in their views. They lash out: you can see it in the media, scapegoating and penal sentencing.
The sense of one's past is so strong and forms our sense of self so strongly, it will always fascinate, elude and confuse me.
Common perceptions of female friendships are morning coffees discussing children, bags, periods and agreeing about the misdemeanours of men... mild, soft, nurturing relationships.