Tom McCarthy: Satin Island

Satin Island gestated during a 2010 residency at the International Artists Studio Programme in Stockholm, which I spent projecting images of oil spills onto huge white walls and gazing at them for days on end. A year later I was the recipient of equally generous hospitality from the Center for Fiction in New York, who lent me a spacious office in which to sit and think about the general impossibility of writing a novel about the general impossibility of etc. As the book started gathering momentum, Alfie Spencer, Ednyfed Tappy and James Westcott helped it along by giving me an invaluable lid-lift on the strange eddies and cross-currents that arise when the tributaries of left-field thought run into the Amazon of new-corporate culture; to them I’m very grateful. Also to Clementine Deliss, to whom I already owed so much, for showing me her remarkable museum. I should also mention Paul Rabinow, whom I’ve never met, but whose brilliantly formulated thoughts on the notion of “the contemporary” I have freely and shamelessly lifted. Satin Island , like all books, contains hundreds of borrowings, echoes, remixes and straight repetitions. To list them all would take up as much space as the text itself. The critical reader can entertain him- or herself tracking some of them down, if he or she is that way inclined.

Finally, I’m indebted to the point of near bankruptcy to the editorial skills of Alex Bowler at Cape and Dan Frank at Knopf; to Melanie Jackson in New York and Jonathan Pegg in London; and to Eva Stenram everywhere.

Tom McCarthy was born in 1969 and lives in London. He is known in the art world for the reports, manifestos and media interventions he has made as general secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network. His previous books include Men in Space, C, Remainder and Tintin and the Secret of Literature . In 2013 he was awarded an inaugural Windham-Campbell Literature Prize from Yale University.