Publication day for stuart gillespie

Congratulations to alumnus Stuart Gillespie whose hybrid memoir Food Fight is published today. Here he talks about his experience on the Life Writing Programme and how he started writing his novel

When do you first remember wanting to be a writer? I first remember being impelled to write a journal when living in a village in southern India in 1984-86 to preserve my sanity and try to make sense of what was going on around me.  For me, it’s verb – to write – not noun. I spent the last forty years in international development when I wrote journal articles, monographs and nine policy/academic books. But Food Fight is my first excursion into creative writing for a different (wider) audience.

Why did you decide to join the Life Writing Programme?  I needed a change in my life. My partner had enrolled in the CWP a couple of years earlier and had a great experience. I enrolled in 2019 and in 2021, I left my job altogether. I felt I couldn’t spend more of my life writing large research proposals while the ‘know-do gap’ (in food, nutrition and health) was widening into an abyss. We really have enough knowledge to act…or to make a much greater impact. Of course, policy and program research will always be key, but the biggest block now is not a lack of knowledge, it’s a lack of action. So, I wanted to move into a more activist mode, but using stories, evidence and experience to better make the case. 

Who were your tutors?  Holly Dawson, Hannah Vincent and Laura Wilkinson – all great writers, fabulous tutors and wonderful human beings!  It was great recently to see that Holly and I share the same publisher, Canongate.

What was the most impactful element of the course for you? Tips and tactics, reading recommendations from tutors. Becoming disciplined about writing. Also the fact my writing was now being critiqued in a different way by tutors and fellow students – reading and listening to their stories and learning from them.

 Did you start writing Food Fight on the course? No, I started (and finished) a novel: Into the Trees and began a memoir.

 What happened after the course finished? I sent the novel around to many agents in the year after the pandemic, received some useful feedback, but I wasn’t able to snare one. I plan to come back to it. I then started a memoir and pinged a proposal out to a handful of agents. The next day, I heard from Victoria Hobbs at A.M. Heath. She had seen something in it which, at that time, hadn’t fully crystallised for me. Working with her, it came into view and I finalised a detailed (50 page) proposal.

 How did you finish Food Fight and get your publishing deal? Victoria then set about finding the right home for the book and within a few weeks, there were three interested publishers. In the summer of 2023, I signed with Canongate. The first B-Corp publisher in the UK, it’s full of dynamic and supportive people. Helena Gonda latched on to the proposal quickly, championed it internally, before providing some great suggestions in the structural edit. Throughout the process – all new to me – she was the perfect guide. The CEO, Jamie Byng championed it in North America while giving me advice on how to further improve it. Canongate later secured deals with three other publishers (HarperCollins in Canada, Pegasus in the US and Zhejiang in China)

 Tell us about Food Fight and the inspiration behind it.  Food  Fight is a hybrid polemic/memoir (…at least that’s how I see it.)  We’re living in a world in rapid flux as forces affecting food, health, climate, inequality combine in cascading crises. Half the world’s population are now malnourished – we are both overfed and undernourished. The book shines a light on our dysfunctional food system, how it came to be captured by predatory transnationals who don’t care about the harms they generate – as politicians sit on the sidelines. But most importantly, it’s about how we build a better system, with people and planet at its heart.

 In terms of inspiration…well, in my early twenties I travelled a lot. Hiking through South America and two years working in a forest in India woke me up. I saw how people became undernourished when their rights to food, health and water were denied. Invariably, they were the poorest, most marginalised. Nutritional status was then a powerful indicator of freedom and justice, of human and societal health. It still is.

 Research in India led to a PhD which led to a decade working with six UN agencies on nutrition and health in Asia and Africa. In 1999, I joined a global food policy think tank and for the next 22 years led policy initiatives on food security and child hunger. Many trenchant insights came from the extraordinary people I ran into – grassroot activists, frontline workers, people in markets, mothers in villages, armed revolutionaries, policymakers and presidents. From them, I heard many stories and learned a lot. Much of the inspiration came from them.

 What’s next for you? Good question…and one I’ve been deliberately sidestepping for the last few months until I see how this book does!  I did start a Substack ‘Food Fight Files’ to keep my focus on this evolving story, where I post every two weeks.  I will come back to the novel and probably rewrite it – but not sure when.

 Do you have a ‘day’ job in addition to your writing career and, if so, how do they complement one another?  I do occasional consultancies but this is periodic and never more than a couple of days per week. I have worked for the Food Foundation (on food justice and investigations into corporate lobbying practices) as well as my previous employer, IFPRI.  But not a day job.

 What are your top tips for someone starting out in their writing career?  Be your authentic self, find ways to energise yourself (for me, it’s getting on my bike), be open to different perspectives and new ideas, step outside your comfort zone, try to enforce some discipline (even if you only write a couple of paras each day) and remember to grow the hide of a rhinoceros if you send your work out to anyone!

Anything else you want to say? The CWP is a great programme and I will continue to recommend it to anyone who shows a smidgen of interest in putting words on paper.

You can buy a copy of Food Fight here.

Are you interested in following in Stuart’s footsteps? Why not sign up for a taster session for our two-year programme which starts in October? We’re running tasters in Brighton, Worthing, Eastbourne, Tunbridge Wells and online between now and September.