Claire Armitstead: I read English literature at university. I graduated in the early 1980s and decided I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. As a first step towards this, I got a job in South Wales as a trainee. I wanted to cover the mining industry there, but they wouldn’t let women into any of the miners’ lodges. You couldn’t really be an industrial correspondent in Wales at that time as a woman, and that’s how I got dragged back towards culture – though culture was I suppose where I would always have ended up.
The good thing about my start was that I am a craft-trained journalist. That means I know how to do shorthand and typing, how to interview people. In a way, my training makes me untypical for a literary journalist. A lot of literary journalists and reviewers come from academia and they have no background in journalism. In fact, this is what makes literary criticism different from other types of art criticism: they have jobs attached to them, whereas literary criticism really often doesn’t. So people who do it need to have other jobs. They tend to be university lecturers or writers.
As a craft-trained journalist, what I bring to my job are my investigative skills. Another thing that comes from my early training is knowing how to tell a story. I really think it is such an underrated part of journalism: the basic ability to construct a story that people want to read. Particularly in culture, we have to be interesting. Otherwise, we will vanish.
We have to accept that literature now is a niche. Film has definitely much more traffic, much more currency today than what we do. It needs a lot of energy and enthusiasm to read books. It is very exhausting. And that is another reason why I believe we should be as generous as we possibly can in our interpretation of what reading is. For example, my son doesn’t read books, but he knows a lot about films, and together we can talk about literature and films and find common ground.
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