Motherwell was stultifying for Barr, and he writes in Maggie


INTERVIEW DAMIAN BARR


SCOTLAND AND ME


DAMIAN BARR


T


he paperback for Damian Barr’s acclaimed début, You Will Be Safe Here (Bloomsbury), is just out—hardly the most propitious publication slot with a nation in lockdown. Even acknowledging the scale of the public health crisis, you could


forgive Barr for feeling a tad disappointed in the luck of his release date. Yet he refuses to be downbeat. Barr says: “First, there’s more


important things going on right now. And, with coronavirus, we are hearing anecdotal evidence that people are spending more time reading. But I have still been hearing from readers… a reader got in touch, saying he leſt South Africa in the 1980s because he was gay and he thought he would be killed if he stayed. But he told me, ‘[Your book] broke my heart open and gave me a way back in for loving my country.’ When you hear something like that, it’s just amazing.” You Will Be Safe Here has a dual timeline, both South Africa- set: the first among the British concentration camps in the Boer War of the early 1900s, the second in a brutal modern-day paramilitary training school that is meant to instil discipline in wayward teens. The two sections could act as independent novels, but are linked by Barr’s compassionate understanding of those who suffer against oppression. The idea was kick-started by the real-life murder of Raymond Buys, a gay 15-year-old South African who was killed aſter suffering brutal mistreatment in 2011 at the Echo Wild Game Rangers camp. Barr says: “I was intending to do a piece of journalism about the murder, but I soon realised I was never going to get to the full truth… I felt I had to make a story up to explore the issues. And that story led me back to the past, to the Boer War, where the British invented the concentration camps, which eventually gave a pretext to start apartheid. I sort of saw this pendulum swinging back and forth, about how the horrors of the past inform the present.” South Africa is a long way from his first book, Maggie and


Me, his 2013 memoir about growing up gay and in an abusive family situation near Motherwell, in the shadow of the Ravenscraig steelworks. (Maggie is former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, a malign background presence whose government does much to destroy the steelworks and its local communit).


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and Me about his eagerness to get away. Which he did, fleeing to London, where he worked as an arts journalist. Eleven years ago, he launched the first Damian Barr’s Literary Salon in Shoreditch House, a night that quickly evolved into one of the country’s most influential events for promoting books. Last autumn, Barr took the salon back home with “The Big Scotish Book Club”, broadcast on BBC Scotland. The show’s run was wildly successful, and has been picked up for a second series. And yet, surprisingly, it is perhaps the only books and authors interview show currently on British TV. The show featured established authors from Scotland and further afield (Ian Rankin, Maggie O’Farrell), but it also showcased a broad range of new and emergent voices like Chris McQueer, Sara Collins and Andrew McMillan. Barr says: “If you are in the books world, you go to book events and see them all packed; you see a massive appetite from the public for them. A lot of television commissioners misunderstand books. They think paper and ink, not stories and people. Once you understand that books are just stories and people, it’s just like any other chat show.” There is even more telly in the works, too, with STV producing a drama based on Maggie and Me. Scotland is embracing Barr, has his relationship with it changed? He says: “We are all moving away from our childhoods but I had a childhood in Scotland that I wasn’t moving, but running, away from. I could not get away fast enough in my twenties. Maggie and Me gave me some peace… but I always felt I was claimed by Scotland. As England becomes ever more obsessed by Englishness and the idea of itself, I become more and more atracted to the values that underpin Scotland. Scotland has changed so much: Glasgow was named one of the best LGBTQ cities in the UK a couple of years ago—that certainly wasn’t the case when I was growing up. So my relationship with Scotland is in a good place. It’s evolving, but Scotland is evolving, too.”


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