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My Writing Life: Benjamin Wood

Benjamin Wood, whose latest novel SEASCRAPER was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025 and won the 2025 Nero Prize for Fiction, was born in 1981 and grew up in Merseyside. He is the author of five novels. His first book won France’s Prix du Roman Fnac and Prix Baudelaire in 2014. His other works have been shortlisted for a number of awards, including the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the Costa First Novel Award, the CWA Gold Dagger Award, the European Union Prize for Literature, the Commonwealth Book Award, and the RSL Encore Award. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at King’s College London, where he teaches fiction modules and founded the PhD in Creative Writing programme. He lives in Surrey with his wife and sons.

1. What book should every writer read?

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.

2. What is your typical writing day like?

It’s a lot different now than it used to be, as I tend to work less at the computer and write longhand. Currently, it’s like this:

Two long stints outdoors on a bench with a notebook and a pencil and a flask of coffee. First one starts after the school run and extends to lunch. Second one goes from after lunch until it’s time to pick my kids up. Later that night, I’ll review what I’ve written during those two stints and feel either pleased or deflated by the results.

3. Who has been an influential figure in your writing career?

The writer Michael Marshall Smith: he put himself out to write me a reference for a scholarship I needed to study creative writing in Canada, which changed my life. And Ailsa Cox, a writer and lecturer I studied with in Preston, who recognised I had a knack for storytelling and prompted me to write a novel in the final year of my degree. I owed a great debt to both of them.

4. What is the one thing you wish someone had told you before you started your career as a professional writer?

That a novel won’t feel alive until I’ve located myself within it. Which means it’s okay to spend a long time — over a year, if necessary — to figure out the right way to tell the story in my head before I put a word of it on paper.

5. What is the best advice you’ve ever received about your writing?

I had a creative writing instructor in Canada who used to tell me one thing quite often: “Real life is no excuse for bad fiction.” I’ve always held on to that particular criticism.

6. What has been the proudest moment of your career so far?

It would have to be the afternoon I discovered I was on The Booker Prizes longlist. It was pretty emotional. Not least because I spent an hour trying to reach my wife at work to tell her the news, and she was the first person I wanted to share it with.

7. What are you reading right now?

A proof of Sebastian Barry’s new book, The Newer World, which is — unsurprisingly — as brilliant as all his previous works.

8. Bookmarker or page-folder?

Both. Page-folding galore for research books. Bookmarks for novels on the go.

This article originally appeared on our Substack. 

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