Richard Milward, 38, grew up in Middlesbrough and lives in London. He is the author of three previous novels: Apples, published when he was 22; Ten Storey Love Song, told in the form of a single 300-page paragraph; and Kimberly’s Capital Punishment (2012), which has six alternative endings. His new novel, Man-Eating Typewriter, a book within a book, is written in Polari and presents an anarchist’s memoir with commentary by an editor at a pulp press in 1970s Soho. The writer Michael Bracewell has called it “extraordinary: as if Mervyn Peake and Kenneth Williams wrote a book with William Burroughs”.
This isn’t the book you’ve previously spoken about working on…
No, for three years I was occupied with a different novel rooted in the experience of spending time with young boxers for a magazine feature I wrote about an East End boxing club. My novels had been getting more surreal and I wanted to do something different – almost to be more experimental by doing something less dreamlike. There’s a novel there and I’ll return to it, but it was more of a struggle to write, maybe because it was outside my surrealistic comfort zone.
