Them big brown stoans in the formers feal they want to stan up and talk like men. 'People will say, 'yes, Hoban, he seems an interesting writer, let's look at him again',' he said.“Stoans want to be lissent to. Russell always wrote with with such a light touch - he always had fun, and made you think that there's not a sentence wasted.'ĭeath, Hoban predicted in 2002, would 'be a good career move'. In his last, Angelica Lost and Found, a hippogriff escapes from a painting and lands in San Francisco outside the window of a Jewish gallery owner who has just dumped her lover. 'His wonderful imagination is a common thread in all his books. 'Like most people I came across Russell through Riddley Walker, which woke me up to what he was doing,' he said.

He described Hoban as a 'shocking, funny and really imaginative' writer. 'It's very, very sad indeed,' said Bill Swainson, Hoban's publisher at Bloomsbury. And besides, when the tank is getting empty I think you drive a little faster.' 'It gives me energy, and now I've got into this rhythm where Angelica's Grotto was followed by Amaryllis and then The Bat Tattoo. Things like Conrad's Nostromo or Schubert's Winterreise or Haydn's Creation or paintings by Daumier make me feel it is a good thing to be part of the human race,' he said. It is art and the creation of art that sustains me. 'If I am kept away from writing I become physically unwell. In an interview with the Guardian in 2002, Hoban described himself as 'simply an addict' to writing. He worked as a freelance illustrator on his return to America, publishing his first book, the illustrated children's title What Does it Do and How Does it Work, in 1959.Īs well as writing (and sometimes illustrating) more than 20 books for adults and children, Hoban's novel Turtle Diary was filmed with a Harold Pinter screenplay, and he also wrote the libretto to Harrison Birtwistle's opera The Second Mrs Kong.

Hoban joined the US army aged 18, and was posted to Italy during the second world war, where he served as a messenger, later awarded a Bronze Star for bravery in action. It has since been included in Harold Bloom's survey of literature, The Western Canon. Riddley Walker, set in Kent 2,000 years after a nuclear holocaust and told in a distinctive version of English, was begun in 1974 and published in 1980 to huge praise.

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban