The Life of Graham Swift
Most authors add little bits of themselves or of their experiences into their books because they write what they know and what they know best is their own life. What if, however, the author grew up in a very normal and uneventful life, as is the case with Graham Swift. Swift begins his first nonfiction work, Making an Elephant: Writing from Within, by describing the two memories he can remember most vividly as a child (Graham Swift). Swift describes the first one as a memory "'of being taken when I was very small to have my polio inoculation'", and he describes the second memory as "'being with my mother in a Croydon department store where a lavish, glittery Santa's grotto had been constructed'" (Graham Swift). These two memories show the common and normal childhood that Swift lived. He fortunately found pieces of himself out of the normalcy that would make great novels, and began his journey into literature.
English: Photo taken by Graham Kinglsey
1744 title page of Swift's Three Sermons
K-SwiftGraham Swift's journey has led him to become a well established British author.
On May 4th 1949, Lionel and Shelia Swift welcomed a bouncing baby boy into the world, a baby they would name Graham (Tredell). Swift's dad worked as a civil servant, and Swift has been quoted saying that all in all his childhood was not extraordinary in any way, or as Swift put it, it was "'a very ordinary suburban existence'". Swift began his education career in a private school, Dulwich College, which has also educated other authors such as Raymond Chandler, C.S. Forester, and P.G. Wodehouse (Tredell). Swift later continued his education career first at Cambridge and then at York, but he did not begin his career as an author right away (Bernard). Instead, he took about ten...