Ask the author – Pip Williams

6th June, 2021

In the final Q&A in our series with this year’s shortlisted authors, Pip Williams tells us more about The Dictionary of Lost Words below and in our video here.

Q: How do you feel about being shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction?  

The first thing I did when I found out I was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize was look up the meaning of shortlisted in the dictionary – essentially, it means to be selected for consideration. In my case, it means that The Dictionary of Lost Words, a novel which I have loved and nurtured and written into being, has been appreciated by others as having some inherent value. It means it is good enough to be considered alongside other historical fiction that have been loved a nurtured and written into being. So, what you are really asking, is how it feels to be considered. In some ways that is a question at the heart of my book – and I can honestly say that knowing my book has been considered worthy of the shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize makes me feel like I’ve been heard; that the themes I explore in my book are as important today as they were in the early 20^th century; that somehow, I have managed to express them in a way that resonates with readers. In short, it is satisfying and humbling and thrilling.

Q: How did the people and times you write about in this novel first lodge in your imagination?

I had read and enjoyed Simon Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne, a non-fiction book about the relationship between the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, James Murray, and one of the volunteers who supplied examples of how words had been used in literature. I became fascinated by the process of compiling the Dictionary, but when I’d finished reading, there were niggling questions I could find no answers for. For example, if everyone involved in defining the words were men, then how well did that first edition of the OED represent the way women used words? If all the words in the OED had to have a textual source (which they did), then what words might have been lost because they were never written down – words spoken by the illiterate, the poor or women doing women’s work. No matter how much of the history I read, I couldn’t find answers to these questions.

What I did find, though, was a curious little story about a lost word. The word bondmaid was discovered missing from the first volume of words in 1901. It should have been between bondly and bondman, but it wasn’t. The word means slave girl, and no one knows how it went missing. It was a mystery ripe for solving, I thought, and that is when the seed of a story began to grow.

Q: Do you think stories about the past can help us to deal with the present and think about the future?

Stories are narrative maps – they tell us where we’ve been and where we’re going. Without them we are lost.

I think fiction is unique in the way it allows writers and readers to interrogate who we are as humans, and what we do to ourselves, to each other and to our planet. Historical fiction is important because it exists between the lines of the accepted facts of history. It provides a glimpse into alternative perspectives, alternative narratives. At its best, historical fiction encourages the writer and the reader to reflect on the past in a way that helps us understand the present and anticipate the future.

Q: What has your experience of the pandemic been and has your writing been affected?

I have family all over the UK who have spent a year in various levels of isolation, and friends in Melbourne who have experienced some of the longest lockdowns in the world. I live in South Australia and am well aware that my experience of the pandemic has been better than most. The most significant impact was the cancellation of all face-to-face events when my book was published in Australia – three days after we went into a hard lockdown in March 2020.  I was fortunate that my children did not need to be home schooled (though there was no end of nagging to go easy on the toilet paper), that I had a flexible job and good internet. Instead of flying around the country meeting readers, I zoomed around. I’ve met hundreds of readers through online events, far more than I ever would have connected with on a face-to-face tour, and there has been plenty of time to dive into my next book.

Q: The 250^th anniversary of Sir Walter Scott’s birth this year will celebrate his massive contribution to cultural life as a novelist, poet, playwright, designer, lawyer, historian and inventor of the historical novel. Does Scott mean anything to you, and do you see yourself continuing his storytelling tradition in any way?

At the centre of my book is a lost word. It would have existed on a slip of paper no bigger than a postcard, and its definition would have reflected the meanings made evident by the writings of poets, novelists, playwrights and historians from centuries passed. That word is bondmaid, it means slave girl, but in the 1880s, when the first words for the Oxford English Dictionary were being collated, bondmaid was lost. No one knows how, so I decided to write a story about it.

When I delved into the historical archives, I came across seven slips documenting the word bondmaid. They were evidence that the word was meant to be included in the dictionary. The slips contained sentences from texts written across hundreds of years, the most recent from 1814 : ‘To Ronald’s bower I brought thee, like a paramour, or bond-maid at her master’s gate.’ It is from The Lord of the Isles, a narrative poem by Walter Scott, in which he weaves the history of Robert the Bruce with a romantic fiction.

For The Dictionary of Lost Words I took this scrap of history and I did what Walter Scott might have done, more than two centuries before. I wove it into fiction. I used it to illuminate a time and place. I used it to engage the reader in historical events that I thought had resonance with our modern times.

Q: The Walter Scott Prize has a younger sibling, the Young Walter Scott Prize, which is a creative writing prize for young people (11-19 years). If you were asked for one tip to help young writers start writing fiction set in the past (before they were born), what would it be?

Write about something that you are incredibly curious about. Something that seems half drawn by the historical record. Something that raises questions that your imagination might have answers to.