Diana Athill webchat - live!
(The Guardian Culture News)

The literary editor and memoirist turns 100 this month, and what better way to celebrate than answering Guardian readers´ questions? 2.42pm GMT imipak says:I would be interested in your views of writing that is not necessarily orthodox in its depth or audience, but also in the role an editor would need to take in such cases. I am certain you have encountered such writing.But I am also interested in where you place yourself in the field of writing. How do you see your own writing and how it has developed?This is quite tricky because it`s perfectly true that eccentric writing often works perfectly well but it might not go down well with you. I think what I would do is call in the other editors, hand it around, and if more people liked it than not then we`d go ahead. I very rarely enjoyed fantasy but I knew some books of fantasy were enjoyed by other people and were very good, so I would hand them on.My own writing is very conventionally good, in that it is clear and economical. You should almost always cut and get it down to the minimum and that is the way I like writing, but of course I think, insofar as I was taught to write at all, I was taught to write like that. I`ve always found it very interesting how much you could cut and how much better it worked when you did. 2.40pm GMT davidabsalom asks:What one book do you really wish you´d had a hand in publishing?There are so many great books that I`d love to have published. I can`t pick out just one. Continue reading...