Transgressive literature will always be a minority pursuit

Nobel judge Horace Engdahl is wrong - creative writing courses and grants arent barriers to becoming a rebellious writer, says Polari winner Diriye Osman

There are many ways to be a writer. Dostoyevsky, Dickens and Wilkie Collins all wrote their novels in serial form for commercial magazines and newspapers. William Burroughs had a private income to support both his drug habit and his writing. MR James was an Eton schoolteacher. Toni Morrison and Diana Athill were renowned editors. William Faulkner hacked out screenplays in 1940s Hollywood to support his more experimental novelistic work. Alice Munro and William Trevor, two of my favourite short story writers, have been on de facto stipends from The New Yorker for decades in order to produce their fiction, while Lorrie Moore, Junot Díaz and Amy Hempel, masters of the short form, have carved out considerable careers as creative writing and English literature professors. Literary legends such as Truman Capote, James Baldwin and Norman Mailer all benefited from respites at artists retreat Yaddo.

So when Nobel judge Horace Engdahl attempts to prescribe a single route to the creation of significant literature the unprofessional literary life, without grants or academic posts, in which writers work as taxi drivers, clerks, secretaries and waiters he seems perversely ignorant of how much of the literature he presumably admires was actually created. While its true creative writing classes do tend to promote conventional notions of good literary craft, it is ridiculous to say that they will lead to the death of western literature. Genuine avant garde or transgressive literature has always been and will always be the pursuit of minority or outsider artists as is literature that speaks truth to power.

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