Authors creative with the truth

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BEST WISHES FROM...: Geoff Dyer signs a book for Michelle Quek.

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DEDICATION: Philip Hoare signs for Helena Brow.

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THE BOYS FROM VENEZUELA: Los Amigos Invisibles, from left, Juan M Roura, Julio Briceno, Maurigo Arcas, Armando Figueredo, and Jose R Torres.

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A journey into the nebulous area between fiction and non-fiction is what awaited those at an audience with creative non-fiction authors Geoff Dyer and Philip Hoare in Writers and Readers Week.

The two British authors yesterday sounded like they were singing from the same song book for most of their conversation with New Zealand biographer Harry Ricketts at the Embassy Theatre, detailing similar journeys into their careers and practically identical philosophies on writing.

One thing that didn't match up was the authors' daily routines - Dyer labelling Hoare a "weirdo" for his detailed, compulsive daily routine, which starts at 5.30am and ends at 8.30pm (except on Christmas Day).

Both writers were taken with World War I, which inspired Dyer's The Missing of the Somme and Hoare's Wilde's Last Stand about collective memory of the war and its legacy.

"The thing [about] the First World War is that it's so present, it's never gone away," Dyer said.

"I think I'm particularly interested in places where time has stood its ground . . . where the temporal is expressed in the geographical, where history becomes geography."

Hoare was fascinated by the memories of the war which have left behind the illegal clubs, drugs and transvestites which cropped up.

Dyer noted the similarities between himself and Hoare.

"I see us both as amateurs really.

"The academic route is encouraging you always toward greater and greater specialisation and [Philip] and I have just gone the other way."

Both Hoare and Dyer have covered a vast range of subjects, from war to photography, the Victorian era to jazz, whales to travel.

"We have really needed to avoid any specialisation."

But that wasn't meant to sound ungrateful - "Although I'm not doing it, I'm very dependent on the labours of experts and specialists," Dyer said.

After two biographies, Hoare broke away from the form to play fast and loose with non-fiction. The technique earned praise from WG Sebald - the very writer who inspired it.

"After that I felt completely free to do what I wanted and that's really affected everything I have written since."

For two authors proud of their chronological accounts of history and novel book structures, it is fitting to leave their similar induction into writing until last.

Dyer labels himself a "beneficiary of a particular historical moment", which began after he completed his university education in 1980 in London.

"I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to sign on for the dole."

Both Dyer and Hoare - who finished university the year before, in 1979 - were coming of age in Thatcherite Britain, when unemployment rates were high but the social welfare state was intact.

"The dole supported a whole generation of writers, artists, dancers."

Philip Hoare also speaks during NZ Post Writers and Readers Week at the Embassy Theatre on Sunday, 3.30pm

- © Fairfax NZ News