Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.

Some of Swift's books have been filmed including Last Orders starring Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins and Waterland starring Jeremy Irons. Swift was acquainted with Ted Hughes and has himself publiGraham Swiftd poetry of note some of which is included in Making an Elephant: Writing from Within (2009). I think in general it’s been a good thing.

Last Orders was joint-winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a mildly controversial winner of the 1996 Booker Prize owing to the superficial similarities in plot to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Born in London England he was educated at Dulwich College London Queens' College Cambridge and later the University of York. Waterland is set in The Fens; a novel of landscape history and family it is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English literature syllabus in British schools.