Eliza Clark’s journey from ambitious Geordie muddling through the country’s literary scene to publishing’s great big hope wouldn’t have happened without the internet. Boy Parts, a darkly comic thriller about a fetish photographer and occasional murderer, was a pandemic smash among young people on TikTok. Clark’s second book – her deliberately askew take on true crime, this summer’s Penance – was rooted in the dark, anarchic chaos of social media. But, perhaps surprisingly, Clark herself has turned her back on it.
“The internet has been such a big part of my life but it’s taken years of work to disengage from it, and realise that it was actually a really negative influence,” the 29-year-old tells me from her flat in south London. When she was named one of the magazine Granta’s Best British Novelists – an every-10-years pick of the country’s future literary stars, that has counted Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan among its alumni – she asked her boyfriend to change the login details to her Twitter account. He now checks it once a week on her behalf, just to get a read on things. She is otherwise – bar her Instagram and a private, deliberately mundane Twitter alt for close friends – offline. “Let’s all just log off,” Clark enthuses, before pausing and apologising. “God, I’m like a guy who’s just taken up running and is now just really into extolling the virtues of running.”
