Sebastian Faulks

A biographical essay by
Diane Stupay

Sebastian Faulks, the prolific author of Birdsong, is 62.  Currently, he is the author of eleven novels and three books of non-fiction, including Faulks on Fiction.  His eleventh novel, Where My Heart Used to Beat will be available in the U.S. this coming January.

Born in Donnington, a village near Newbury in Berkshire in south central England in 1953, Faulks refers to his childhood as a happy time.  “My parents were kind, humorous and affectionate. My older brother, Edward, was a great companion.  I think the 1950’s were a bit austere if you were a grown up, but for a child it was a good time, with Hornby trains and Meccano (which I could never master) and then came the Beatles.”

Peter Faulks, Sebastian’s father, was a partner in a local law firm.  In 1939 he enlisted in the Duke of Wellington’s infantry regiment. He fought in Europe, North African, Palestine and Syria.  He was awarded the Military Cross in Tunisia.  He was wounded in North Africa and again when his company was in slit trenches at Anzio.  He made a full recovery, completed his law training, and later sat as a judge in London and Reading.

Pamela Faulks, Sebastian’s mother, was the daughter of Philip Lawless.  Lawless served in the Artist Rifles in World War I.  He was a sports reporter for the Morning Post and Dailey Telegraph specializing in rugby and golf.  In 1945, he was reporting on the American advancement across the first Rhine brigdehead when he was killed by enemy fire.

Faulks’ mother introduced her sons to books at a young age.  She also took them to the theatre and galleries in London. “ She had the full classical canon on vinyl and we absorbed all that, though we were much keener on pop music.”  “My father was into books only,” noted Faulks . . . he liked Trollope, Waugh, Graham Greene.  My mother knew all of Dickens backward.  Those characters were real people to her.”  In a interview in 2008, Faulks says that as a child he read all the time.  He was a bit of a loner, but he was not lonely.   He decided by age 14 that he wanted to be a writer. He was inspired by Dickens and D.H. Lawrence among others.

The Faulks brother were educated at Elstree School near Reading. “It was a demanding and old-fashioned school, we both had to rise to the challenge.”  In 1966, Faulks went as top scholar to Wellington College, a coeducational independent boarding and day school in the Berkshire District. In 1970 he won an ‘open exhibition’ to read English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.  He graduated in 1974, and was elected an Honorary Fellow in 2007. 

In the year between school and university, Faulks studied in Paris for three months and learned to speak French.  Then he spent a year in Bristol trying to write a novel with little success.  After that he moved to London where he taught in a private school for two years before finding a job running a small book club called the New Fiction Society, funded by the Arts Council to stimulate sales of literary fiction.  He took over from the novelist David Hughes who became a lifelong friend.  In 1979 at the age of 26, Faulks joined the staff of the Daily Telegraph as a junior reporter.  Also, he worked as a freelance book reviewer for the Sunday Times, and then at the Spectator and Books and Bookmen. During this time he was writing books in the evening and on weekends, “but they weren’t much good,” he notes. 

After sharing a house with his brother Edward for a time, Sebastian moved into his own flat. “I had no television and I was meant to just write at night. Eventually, on the fourth attempt, I wrote something publishable.”  He called up a publisher he had met at a party, James Mitchie without realizing how well known Mitchie was.  Mitchie had published Graham Greene and had discovered Sylvia Plath. After some ‘humming and hah-ing’ Mitchie accepted the book called A Trick of Light.  “I got the news in a phone booth on Holborn Viaduct.  It was a good moment; it felt like the beginning of something at last, after a long and occasionally dispiriting apprenticeship.” Faulks was twenty-nine.  Three years later in1986 he joined the Independent as Literary Editor.  He had been working for the Sunday Telegraph from ’83-’86 as a feature writer. 

In 1989 he married Veronica Youlten, formerly his assistant on the Independent.  She went on tobecome one of the editors the Independent. They have three children and live in London.  They spent a year in south west France, near Agen, in 1995-96 while Faulks was writing Charlotte Gray, the third of his novels set in France.  “To be analytical about it,” Faulks said, “What really appealed to me about France was not France itself, but was the fact that the past was so much more easily available in that country than in my own.”  Fifteen minutes off of the main highways and you are back in the ‘20s and ‘30s. To explore and better understand the French people, Sebastian read French history.  Reading about the trauma of World War I followed in twenty years by the German occupation from 1940 to 1944 gave Faulks an understanding about really happened during that period.

Charlotte Gray was published in 1998.  The first book in the French trilogy, The Girl at the Lion D’Or was published in 1989 by Hutchinson, who continue to be Faulks’ publisher.  Following the success of Birdsong (1993), Faulks has focused all of his energies on books.  ‘I haven’t had a proper job for years and would now be unemployable,’ he said in a 2005 interview.

When asked further about his interest in France, Faulks said that he was first introduced to the small towns in France at the age of eight on a family vacation in Brittany.  “It must have left an impression.”  He studied French in school.  Then in the year between school and university, he studied in Paris.  Faulks describes this as a very lonely time, saying he didn’t much enjoy Paris.  He much prefers the smaller towns and villages.  Later, after University, he started visiting France in a car, driving around with friends or alone.  It was then that he became fascinated with northern and Central France.  “You’d go down the main roads, and then you’d go off them into minor roads, and then you’d go off those into even smaller roads.  You’d end up staying the night in a run-down auberge and have just whatever dinner was on offer.”  He goes on to say, “I liked the sense in these small places, the fact that they were rather closed up and quite formal and in some ways really unfriendly, I suppose, difficult to get hold of, difficult to penetrate through this formal exterior. . .I had this sense that there was drama beneath the surface, and that there were secrets.  . .people who lived there had hidden passions, long, long untold secrets.”  Faulks found this intriguing or as he put it, “That part of my brain which deals with creative things would suddenly light up.”

When asked by an interviewer, “What did France do for you?  Faulks replied, “It enabled me to become a writer by getting me out of my own culture.”