Why we love fiction about sport

Happy Sunday and welcome to the very first edition of Bookmarks written under a Labour government! This week the literary world lost another great: Albanian writer Ismail Kadare died aged 88, it was announced on Monday. Frank Cottrell-Boyce was named the new children’s laureate, and nine book festivals previously sponsored by investment management firm Baillie Gifford have joined forces to call for alternative sponsorship.

As sports fans tune in to watch the Euros and Wimbledon, and gear up for the Paris Olympics, in this week’s newsletter I look at what drives writers and readers to fiction about sport. And our European culture editor Philip Oltermann recommends some of the best books he’s read lately.

You only have to walk past a pub while an England match is on to understand how much sport means to so many people. It “occupies an enormous part of many people’s lives”, says David Peace, author of football novels The Damned Utd and Red or Dead. Sport “provides a sense of continuity and community, often otherwise missing elsewhere”, he thinks, as well as being “filled with dramatic narratives, charismatic characters and the ever-present hope of success, victories small or large”.

The challenge then, when writing a novel about sport, is competing with sport itself, which is ever-more accessible via myriad TV channels and streaming services. “But if the writer can harness the drama of sport and go behind the scenes, beneath the skin, then I think the reader will follow,” Peace says.

As with much good fiction, writing about sport is often a vehicle to write about people, and the strange ways our brains and bodies work and interact with others. Peace was drawn to write his sports novels, which are based on real football players and managers, primarily because of his interest in these men as characters. “The history of football is a great part of the history of the working class, for these were all men who came from extremely poor backgrounds, often with little formal education, but who succeeded, not only through their physical ability or strength, but through the power of their intellect,” he says. “And yet such positive working-class characters, such charismatic working-class voices are ones we rarely if ever get to see or hear in literature.”

As the literary sports canon continues to expand, there is plenty of choice for those wanting to read their way through this summer of sport. Peace recommends the 2022 novel Your Show by Ashley Hickson-Lovence. The novel, which blends match reports with poetry, tells the story of Uriah Rennie, the first black referee to officiate in the Premier League, “and does so in ways that challenge and expand the possibilities of literature itself,” Peace says.

If you’re looking for a classic bonkbuster with a sporty twist, then you could try Jilly Cooper’s football novel Tackle! The romance writer is no stranger to writing about sport – her beloved Rutshire Chronicles series is set in the world of show jumping and polo – but in her latest novel she takes on the beautiful game. Or fans of the hyped tennis film Challengers might enjoy the tale of a grand slam champion, Carrie SotoIs Back, by one of BookTok’s favourite authors Taylor Jenkins Reid.

And for something a little more experimental, you could try Kathryn Scanlan’s Gordon Burn prize-winning novel about a horse trainer, Kick the Latch. This brilliant story, told via edited extracts from an elderly woman’s diary, comes highly recommended by American author Rita Bullwinkel, whose own sporting novel, Headshot, about a fictional boxing tournament for teenage girls, came out earlier this year to critical acclaim.

For Bullwinkel, the best kind of sports fiction takes you out of your head as you read and makes you feel connected to your body. For both writers and readers, sports fiction can be a kind of “relief”, she thinks. When you imagine yourself entering a boxing ring, or a pool, or a pitch, you are entering somewhere “where the rules of play are clear”, she says. When “the rules of play of life are so unclear”, fiction about sport can help us find escape or clarity.

It’s the centenary of Franz Kafka’s death this year, and the proper way to mark this is by dipping into Reiner Stach’s magisterial and scenic three-volume biography. Two decades in the making, its volumes were published in non-chronological order due to legal wranglings with the estate of Kafka’s literary executor Max Brod, and thus The Decisive Years – published in German in 2002 and English in 2005 – is still the best way to start. I’ve struggled to get the Prague-born writer out of my head while reading another book set in a Mitteleuropean city. Barbi Marković’s Vienna-set collection Minihorroris Kafka-like in its ability to conjure something that lands in the twilight zone between terror and comedy. A series of horror stories, told in the style of Mickey Mouse comics, Marković’s book made me shiver and snort with laughter. Marković was born in Belgrade and writes in her second language, German – Faber are publishing it in English next year, and I can’t wait to see how it translates.

The other recently published book that I found similarly engrossing is 656 pages long. Belgian author David van Reybrouck’s Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World is a definitive history of Indonesia’s struggle for independence from Dutch colonial rule shortly after the end of the second world war. It’s grippingly written, drawing on hours of interviews with ageing eyewitnesses. Van Reybrouck manages to flip the picture of the globe in his reader’s head so that what might at the start of the book seem like a marginal chapter in post-second-world-war history feels at the end like a story about the centre of the world.

I am about a decade late to the Norwegian boom in autofiction that caught the world’s attention with Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, and I’m trying to catch up, so at the moment I am reading Vigdis Hjorth’s If Only, a joyously humourless account of infidelity and obsession originally published in Norway in 2001 but now translated into English for the first time by Verso.