The Author
The Author interview
Susan Hill looks back to her novel and forwards to Finney’s opera of A Kind Man
A friend told me some years ago that she had been staying in Ireland and heard of a local man who had apparently started to heal people, quite suddenly. News about him spread, until dozens of sick people visited him, wanting to be cured and he felt he had to help them, though his new gift bewildered him. Then, after a year or two, just as abruptly, the healing power deserted him. The story stayed with me & I knew I would do something with it one day.
I only look back when asked questions about them. But I have one or two I am fond of, including this though I don’t really know why.
It used to play a huge part. For deeply private & personal reasons, I find it hard to listen to much now, unless it’s ephemera or brass bands. And I’ll go to any production of The Magic Flute.
Yes, Diana Burrell wrote an opera based on my novella The Albatross. I am always very happy for an artist in any other medium to take my books and recreate them as they want, because of course they’re not actually changing a word. The book is always still there, as it was written, to be read.
No. They do exactly what they want. See above!
Yes. It all does nothing but good.
Apart from the quite separate crime novels, all my books are like this. The reader’s imagination does the ‘colouring in’, which is why writing fiction is always a live collaboration. The same applies to dramatisation and opera.
It can only add another layer of richness and meaning. Writing, producing, directing and performing an opera is a huge undertaking, and has to be a labour of love. I hope everyone who sees it will love it, and even more, that it will have a life.
Susan Hill’s A Kind Man achieved an immediate impact on its publication in 2011.
Dame Susan Hill (born in Scarborough, England, 5 February 1942) is an author of fiction and non-fiction works. Her novels include The Woman in Black, The Mist in the Mirror and I’m the King of the Castle. Her first novel, The Enclosure, was published in 1961 and since 1979 there has been barely a year when she has not had one or several books published. She won a Somerset Maugham Award for I’m the King of the Castle (1971), the Whitbread Novel Award for The Bird of Night (1972), and the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Albatross (1971), a collection of short stories.
The Woman in Black (1983), the first of a series of ghost stories by Hill, has been successfully adapted for stage, film and television. She has also written series of Simon Serrailler crime novels, two volumes of memoirs, radio plays, books of non-fiction and children’s stories, and is busy as a reviewer, critic, broadcaster and editor.
Her A Kind Man shows once again Hill’s keen insights into the psychology of family relationships, particularly those families whose protagonists are perhaps remote from and ill at ease with society. While an author’s life does not necessarily find reflection in an artist’s work, it is true that Susan Hill’s own experience of loss finds echoes not only in A Kind Man but in her other works of fiction.
Photograph: Ben Graville
A Kind Man: An Opera of Resilience, Love, and Miraculous Redemption. Contact us to discuss licensing A Kind Man.
