Children, be curious. Nothing is worse (I know it) than when curiosity stops. Nothing is more repressive than the repression of curiosity. Curiosity begets love. It weds us to the world. It's part of our perverse, madcap love for this impossible planet we inhabit. People die when curiosity goes. People have to find out, people have to know.

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.