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Interview [published March 1997]
Tibor Fischer: The Fischer King
Cliff Taylor gets a rare interview with the reclusive Tibor Fischer
The scene: a typically wintry Wednesday afternoon.
Upstairs at The Lift in Brighton’s Queen Road, some
whey-faced literary types are gathered around a table
for a seminar of sorts. Their rapt attention is focused
upon The Writer in their midst, a slightly grizzled
36-year-old phenomenon dressed in a less-than-chic
brown leather jacket, clown T-shirt and black jeans. His
name is Tibor Fischer.
How To Get Ahead In The Writing Game. Lesson
One: “Sleep with someone in publishing,” advises
Fischer, sipping his tea. Failing this, his next tip is to
stick to Lesson Two: never take no for an answer. “I’m
an expert on rejection letters,” he imparts, referring to
the 58 negative responses which almost buried alive his
debut novel Under The Frog. “It’s a lottery,” he shrugs.
It seems scarcely believable now that the professional
readers of all those imprints could have been
so uniformly myopic when presented with a work as
blindingly brilliant as Under The Frog, which was
shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993 and propelled
Fischer into the contentious ranks of The Best Of Young
British Novelists.
BUY Tibor Fischer books online from and
Which brings us to Lesson Three: “Most agents
and publishers are shits.” The whey- faced literary
types dutifully scribble “shits” on their notepads. But
one can’t help thinking such tribulations must be past
history for Fischer. After all, he is now the lionized litterateur
invited down from London by Brighton’s Do
Tongues spoken word club to read from his new novel
The Thought Gang, which is currently leapfrogging
into reprints and soon to be made into a film. These
days Fischer gets advances and can afford to indulge
in a little positive vengefulness against those faceless
arbiters who are the hate figures of would-be authors.
But what is the secret? demand the gathered
would-be authors. How can we too hitch a ride to
planet Picador? Fischer shrugs again, looking so
frustratingly ordinary. (He wears brand new Nike
sneakers. He was born in Stockport! His mother was
captain of the Hungarian women’s basketball team,
but there’s no genetic evidence of that either.) He
doesn’t give interviews and he’s too modest to say it,
but the secret is unsharable anyway, locked securely
inside that slightly balding, slightly greying skull.
216
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