The Scottish poet and editor on defying conventions of genre, the elusive nature of what he does, and the importance of external validation
Robin Robertson is an acclaimed poet who has won all three of the Forward poetry prizes. His latest work, The Long Take, a narrative poem, is set in the years immediately after the second world war. The story unfolds in New York, San Francisco and, most importantly, Los Angeles, and follows Walker, a traumatised D-day veteran from Nova Scotia, as he tries to piece his life together just as the American dream is beginning to fray at its edges. It was shortlisted for the Booker prize and, last month, won the Goldsmiths prize for fiction, awarded to works that “open up new possibilities for the novel form”. Robertson also works as an editor at Jonathan Cape, where he publishes, among many others, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Oswald and Adam Thorpe.
When you come to look back on this year, and the fact that what you took for a poem has been so celebrated as a novel, what will you think?
That it’s all been a terrible accident? It is rather dreamlike. But this confusion over genre. I’ve been asked about it a lot. It is a long narrative poem; I don’t want to apologise for that. However, it’s also sui generis. It has prose in it, too. It’s to do with how you propel narrative; with how you make the reader pay attention to particular aspects of the story. Writing it as I did allowed for more control over some of those techniques.
Related: Robin Robertson wins Goldsmiths prize for innovative fiction with The Long Take
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