Mike Leigh On Literary List

The Book Magazine's poll to decide "The Greatest Living British Writer" has included Mike Leigh on the strength of his film work alone - score one, I suppose, for the cinema. I've long since had enough of screenwriters being treated like second class writers...

...but Mike Leigh, though? That most of the dialogue in Leigh's films, and a great amount of their structure and incident also, is the result of communal, improvisational workshipping seems to have been judged besides the point. It seems this list is rather more about a sense of Britishness than it is Greatness - the attendant puffery by Gordon Kerr makes that clear enough.

I recommended Neil Gaiman as an addition to the list, and a message told me had been added. I believe it meant to say he would now be considered for addition.

If, somehow, he isn't rejected, and he arrives on the list of options, I urge you to lend him your support. Not only does he write screenplays as well as novels, he also writes books for children and even - the lowest of the low - comic books. Poor Neil must be a soot-blackened workhouse boy in the eyes of the literary establishment, fit for nothing but spitting on.