The Interview : Benjamin Markovits

Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Benjamin Markovits, a British-American writer. He is the author of twelve novels, among them a trilogy on the life of Lord Byron. He was selected as one of the Best of Young British Novelists by Granta magazine in 2013. In 2016, his novel You Don't Have To Live Like This won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. In 2025, his novel The Rest of Our Lives has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Markovits grew up in Texas, London and Berlin, and studied at Yale University and the University of Oxford. After college, he played professional basketball in Landshut, Germany, for a team in the southern league of the German second division. He now lives in London, where he teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Thank you Ben for talking with The Wise Owl. Congratulations on being longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025. It is a wonderful achievement.

RS: Your book, The Rest of Our Lives, begins with a simple, almost everyday premise—children leaving home—yet unfolds into a meditation on love, regret, and freedom. What was it about this quiet turning point in life that compelled you to build a novel around it?

BM: Well, my kids are getting older, and my circle of friends (and siblings) are going through the same thing . . . It seems like a significant landmark. In fiction you sometimes have to force your characters into moments of wider reflection, for the sake of the story, but this seems like a period in people’s lives when they naturally begin to think about things like, what just happened to the last twenty years, and what do I want now?

RS: The American road trip novel often celebrates wide horizons, open skies and restless adventure. In your story, the road seems to turn inward, becoming a journey through memory and marriage. How did you reimagine this classic form to fit Tom’s inner life?

BM: That’s an interesting way of putting it. It seems to me that one of the difficulties of the road trip story is that it often involves your character running away from the source of the plot. In this case, an unhappy marriage. Obviously, one reason for hitting the road is so that new things can happen to you, but I also wanted the story to build on the past. So Tom visits various people from his old life, grad school buddies, an ex-girlfriend, his brother – which is in fact what people often do on road trips, sleep in the spare rooms and on the sofa beds of people they used to be closer to. But he also spends a lot of time thinking about his wife, trying to figure out what went wrong. Sometimes it’s easier to talk to people in your head than in your kitchen, and being on the road made certain conversations possible that hadn’t been possible before.

RS: From Byron’s tempestuous genius to Tom Layward’s quiet reckoning, your novels move between the grand and the everyday. Do you see yourself tracing a continuum of human experience, or are these shifts more about following the stories that compel you at a given time?

BM: A lot of the Byron novels were about the ordinary people around him, his doctor, his wife, trying to deal with the painful comparisons between themselves and Byron – because Byron was so successful, so much at the centre of his world, it was hard not to feel insignificant beside him. Actually, even Byron had to deal with these comparisons as he got older, between the middle-aged man he had become and his own youthful celebrity. I wrote about a similar contrast in Playing Days, my novel about minor-league basketball, which was based on my own very brief first-hand contact with Dirk Nowitzki. He was only a seventeen-year-old kid when I played against him, but he went on to become one of the greatest (and richest) players in the world. His greatness shone a kind of light of contrast on the people around me, who were mostly very gifted athletes, hard-working, disciplined and smart. But they weren’t quite good enough to make out of their talents the kind of life they wanted to live, which is why we were stuck in a small town outside Munich, in a minor European league. That contrast seemed like an interesting starting point for fiction.

RS: Much of your work examines masculinity in its different guises- from Byron’s tempestuous genius to the racial and social complexities faced by Greg Marnier in You Don’t Have to Live Like This, to Tom Layward’s quiet discontent in The Rest of Our Lives. Do you see your novels as a sustained exploration of what it means to be a man across different times and contexts—or do you approach each character as a new puzzle, independent of the others?

BM: I’ve been putting together a collection of stories and realised that a common thread running through them was, well, problems of ‘masculinity in its different guises’ (working title, ‘Boy Troubles’). It wasn’t conscious, but the truth is, I’ve never been that comfortable with male expectations, whatever that means – one of the reasons I probably struggled on high school basketball teams, I didn’t know how to stick up for myself in the locker room. Some of this tendency though just comes down to the autobiographical games I like to play. Inevitably, those novels are told from a male point of view. But the others tend to split their attention pretty equally – in the Essinger novels, for example, or A Quiet Adjustment, which is told almost entirely from the perspective of Lady Byron. Even The Rest of Our Lives seems to me almost as much about Amy as it is about Tom. 

RS: You’ve had a fascinatingly varied life-growing up across three countries, studying at Yale and Oxford, playing professional basketball. Do you find traces of these experiences seeping into your fiction, or does writing come from a quieter, more private, detached source?

BM: We moved around a lot when I was a kid (between Austin, London, Oxford and Berlin) but we were also fairly unadventurous – we didn’t travel so much as return to different places we considered home. My mother is German; my dad studied at the LSE and fell in love with London; my brother was born there. The only really adventurous thing I ever did was fly to Europe after university to find a job playing basketball, which I turned out to hate; I’ve never been more miserable. But yes, you’re right - my life has seemed to me uneventful enough that I’ve had to make use of any experience I can get my hands on. Including the basketball. The one exception, really, is living in England, where I’ve spent (by this point) over half my life but have written about much less than America. That may be slowly changing. England features more in the new novel (which I’m editing now), though the focus is still on what it means to an outsider. That’s probably another result of moving around so much: even though we were always at home, we still felt like outsiders.

RS: Your novels have been recognised with some of the most significant literary honours-Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, the James Tait Black Prize, and now the Booker longlist. How do such milestones sit alongside the solitary, day-to-day work of writing? Do they reshape your sense of what you’re doing, or do you prefer to keep the process of creating fiction untouched by the noise of awards?

BM: I’m not quite sure how to answer that. You need some breaks, some moments of luck, just to keep going as a writer. At the same time, on a rainy Tuesday morning in November, when I sit down to write, it still seems a very solitary thing to do. Nobody’s watching or cares if I’m writing or not, and the idea of publication or even somebody reading what I happen to be working on still seems almost implausibly distant. Which is very helpful, too, because part of what we want from fiction (or at least, what I want) is a kind of access to what people are actually thinking when no one else is around.

RS: Teaching creative writing means you’re constantly in conversation with younger writers, their experiments with form and voice. In what ways has that dialogue fed back into your own work, or perhaps offered you new ways of thinking about fiction?

BM: Yes, it’s interesting to talk to people from a different generation about the things they think are shaping their lives and the world. I also teach straight literature classes, and you get to watch your students reading on the page – their reactions to a passage of dialogue, or a description, or a sequence of events. It gives you a chance to argue about what seems true and why. The other thing that teaching Creative Writing forces you to do is to codify your instincts, to make you conscious of them. That’s mostly helpful but maybe not always. Sometimes the point of instincts is that you don’t have to think about them.

RS: Some of our readers are upcoming writers. What would be your advice to them on how to hone their craft and skills?

BM: The great thing about writing fiction is that nobody can stop you. It’s one of the arts where you don’t need anyone else to say yes before you can begin. Obviously, you have to find the time, and the money to support the habit, but even an hour a day can be enough. And you don’t need a studio, or a group of actors, or expensive equipment. In fact, it can be useful having only a limited time; it forces you to break off in the middle. Then you end up thinking about the book the rest of the day, so that the next time you sit down, you’ve got momentum. The trick is to give yourself the right preoccupations. A writer once said, writing a novel is like driving on a mountain road late at night. You want to know where you’re trying to get to, and you should be able to see thirty yards in advance. Those seem like useful things to worry about.

Thank you Ben for taking time out of your busy schedule and connecting with us. We wish you the very best in all your creative and literary endeavours and hope your work wins you more literary accolades.