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RTÉ News
13 hours ago
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Book Of The Week: The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine
When John William De Forest coined the expression 'Great American Novel' in 1868, he anticipated a work which had the ability communicate the tableau of contemporary living through "the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence". Mark Twain was touted as an early contender, as was Henry James, who internalised the concept so enthusiastically that by the time he reached the later stages of his career, he wrote obsessive tracts of self-criticism that ended up pummelling his sentences into meta-commentaries on their own construction. The term had barely been born before authors started missing the point. The 'Great American Novel' was meant to simplify as well as elucidate; to mirror American society back on itself so that the spirit of the nation could be recognised more easily. Given the evident impossibility of the task, it's as well that Irish literature has not developed some lofty equivalent. Contenders for greatness are by this point so innumerable that anybody caught striving is rightfully scorned for having 'notions'. We have texts comprising a national body of work which seeks to add to the whole rather than trying to encapsulate it fully. We have great novels about Dublin, great novels about Cork, great novels about Limerick and of course, great novels about Belfast. Listen: Oliver Callan talks to Wendy Erskine The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine is one such great novel. Written in a mixture of third-person present tense and first-person past, the polyphonic narrative of the book belies its relatively short length. At just over 320 pages, The Benefactors has the lush feel of a Dickensian epic; one in which the city of Belfast fulfils its role as hidden protagonist of a tale spanning everything from gender politics and class to intergenerational trauma and the legacy of the Troubles. Which isn't to say that the book is without wit. Erskine has one of the keenest ears for dialogue in the business meaning that, even under the most horrendous circumstances, her characters can still be disarmingly funny. "Most people are stupid and do stuff without too much consideration or forethought," one character considers. "Read too deeply into individuals' actions and you end up crediting them with too much intelligence. Way too much intelligence." The Benefactors has the lush feel of a Dickensian epic At its core, The Benefactors is a novel about three mothers and three sons – each from varyingly affluent backgrounds – as they use their power and influence to try and defuse the potential fallout from a sexual assault allegation. In lesser hands, such explosive material might come across as polemical or, worse, heightened to the point where its hard-won realism comes across as frenzied. Yet Erskine navigates the subject with compassion; emphasising the frailty of human endeavour such that we can't help but be moved by the mothers' plight even as we are disgusted by their conduct and behaviour. If I have one quibble, it's that the sheer volume of characters and voices at times threatens to overwhelm the integrity of the narrative. One can't help but wonder whether Erskine's training as a short story writer motivated the story's fragmentary construction, littered as it is with asides separate from the main thread. Thankfully it all comes together. Erskine is a skilled medium and while The Benefactors is not the all-encompassing 'Great Irish Novel' that elucidates everything in the national character, it is a vital puzzle piece; one that confirms Belfast as an important site for the imagination, holding no less than the world within its sagging redbrick walls.
Daily Mirror
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Largest-ever cast for an audiobook brought together for exciting new project
Writer Wendy Erskine's The Benefactors is one of the most hotly anticipated books of the year for 2025. Audiobook fans are in for a treat, as a cast of more than 30 narrators record this debut novel Irish writer Wendy Erskine 's debut novel has been hotly anticipated since it was snapped up by Sceptre in 24-hour pre-empt in September 2024. Centring around a sexual assault, the novel explores pushing family connections to their breaking point, the implications of wealth and class in contemporary Belfast. All of life is here in the pages of Erskine's The Benefactors, and so, it is no surprise that a polyphonic array of voices from the city appear in the audiobook, too. The main narrative is spread over five points of view, three of which are mothers whose sons have sexually assaulted a schoolfriend, Misty. Misty and her own step-father, Boogie's narratives bring the reader close to the horrors of seeking justice. But while this is a novel about a traumatic event, Erskine's style is to fuse humour and heart throughout. Publisher of The Benefactors Hodder & Stoughton commissioned its largest-ever cast for the audiobook. More than 30 narrators contributed to the audiobook, making it the largest cast to date for the publishers' audiobook production. Open casting submission sought to find voice-talent, which was then chosen by Erskine for inclusion in the audio-recording. As in the audio editions of her two short story collections, Erskine herself narrates the majority of the book. But interspersed between this through-line story of sexual assault in modern Belfast are more than 30 narrators. One of which is David Torrens, the owner of Belfast-based independent bookshop No Alibis, a stalwart in supporting the Irish writing community. The Benefactors is refreshing for its expansive narrative net it casts around the city. No city is defined by one event, and so too is Erskine's Belfast not solely focused on a sexual assault case. These narratives range from a woman seeking her long-lost son, and it going horribly wrong, to life amongst the dead in funeral parlours. Erskine told The Bookseller: 'The experience of this book moving from the page to audio was – and this is no exaggeration – wonderful. Right from the beginning, the approach was innovative and predicated on giving listeners the most authentic experience of the book. 'I was there for the recording of many of the monologues, most of which were done by people with no previous experience of that kind of thing and wow, what they brought to my words was beyond what I could possibly have anticipated.' Erskine burst onto the literary scene with her short story collection Sweet Home, published by the Stinging Fly and Picador in 2018. Her follow-up collection Dance Move was a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime. She has been listed for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and the Edge Hill Prize. She was awarded the Butler Prize for Literature and the Edge Hill Readers' Prize. Taken as a whole, Erskine's works form a census of modern Belfast, taking in everything from conversations in hairdressers' salons to the aftermath of sexual assault.
The Guardian
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine review – a polyphonic portrait of class and trauma in Belfast
That we tend to regard the shift from the short story to the novel as a natural authorial progression perhaps speaks to a failure to recognise the shorter form as its own distinct discipline. Short stories are not novels in miniature, or parts of novels pruned to stand on their own. Without the luxury of space and looser pacing, they demand of the writer a linguistic precision and compression that, at its most radical, borders on the poetic, and which across the breadth of a novel would feel wearying. Novels need room to breathe. The writer expanding their scope therefore faces a difficult adjustment: guarding against density while ensuring they don't get lost in the space. For Wendy Erskine, the move to a larger canvas feels entirely unforced. Her highly praised stories, collected in 2018's Sweet Home and 2022's Dance Move, often display a certain capaciousness, a willingness to wander beyond the single epiphanic moment that is the traditional preserve of the short story. Now, in her first novel, she revels in the possibilities of an expanded cast, yet controls the pace and framing with all the precision of a miniaturist. The result is a novel that feels like a balancing act: at once sprawling and meticulous, polyphonic and tonally coherent. The Benefactors is ambitiously structured, but functions in some ways as a short story with a novel around it. At the book's heart is a pivotal, life-altering moment. Gracefully flowing into and out of it are the day-to-day lives that the moment both springs from and distorts, rendered in a tapestry of third-person narration and unattributed interjections of monologue – a kind of community chorus, commenting and adding colour. At the centre is Misty, a teenager who dreams of a career in special effects makeup, but who tops up her current job in a hotel by putting in the hours on Bennyz, or Benefactors, a camgirl site not unlike OnlyFans. Misty has a crush on Chris, the spoiled son of a wealthy businessman, but at a party in an Airbnb Chris and his friends Rami and Lineup sexually assault her. The trauma is Misty's, but the aftermath is dominated by the parents: Misty's adoptive father Boogie, Chris's stepmother Frankie, Rami's widowed mother Miriam, and Lineup's idealistic but ultimately hypocritical mother Bronagh, who runs a successful children's charity. Erskine's great gift is for character. Not a single figure in this novel feels contrived; all are complicatedly flawed and empathetically rendered. In the novel's first third, Erskine juggles not only a series of perspectival shifts but also multiple, fragmentary diversions back in time, constructing from a mosaic of voices and moments both a convincing cast and a richly textured collective portrait of suburban Belfast – an array of pasts and circumstances deeply and believably integrated. As the novel comes to rest in the present, Erskine draws for the communication of her characters' inner lives on her other most striking skill: the construction of warmly human dialogue on the page. In the book's most remarkable character, Misty's wonderfully abrasive grandmother Nan D, all Erskine's generous literary gifts find their perfect expression. Observe, for example, the sheer rhythmic poetry that careens across the page when Nan D, who favours a more direct form of reparation than the criminal justice system allows for, sardonically relays in beautifully cadenced sarcasm a cinematic fantasy of justice heroically upheld: Misty could end up with one of those lawyers like off the films, a young underdog, nice long hair like your woman, can't remember her name. She's been in loads of things. From the wrong side of the tracks, underdog, but sees something in Misty that reminds her of herself, you know what I mean? And works night and day. In libraries at midnight and grafting grafting grafting. And she turns a whole jury around, our girl. And those guys are going down and their lives are just grubbed up for all time. Boogie, too, is touchingly portrayed. The scene when, on hearing that Misty has been assaulted, he drives to the supermarket on the way to collect her from the police station and buys all the uncomplicated comfort he can think of – food, a dressing gown, orange juice – is, like much of this novel, poignant and true without ever being sentimental or manipulative. When Misty's sister Gen, who accompanies Misty to the police station, uses the word 'Dad' – just once, and entirely uneditorialised – the reader feels the weight of it without anything further needing to be said, such is the depth of the characterisation that has gone before. As should be obvious by this point, there is no doubting Erskine's skill as a writer. The problem is that skill itself must be skilfully deployed – rougher textures allowed to show through the polish. Otherwise, the depiction can cleanse the subject of life. The Benefactors is a work of great assurance and precision, but by the end there is a sense that it has imposed its discipline and control on its characters, denying them emotional expansiveness. The novel's structure – the quotidian trickling towards the seismic, the seismic dissolving in turn back into the quotidian – makes a perfectly valid point about the processing of trauma in collective life, but it costs the story its impact. When, towards the end, a character finally loses their temper, allows themselves to be seized by the irrational, it feels less like a shock than a relief, as if they have shattered not just their own inner reservation but the constraints of the narration around them – a narration that circles a significant trauma, but somehow never quite reaches inside it, as if in fear of what might be found there, and how it might trouble the perfect surface of Erskine's creation. The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine is published by Sceptre (£18.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Irish Times
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
‘I wanted to do something radical': Wendy Erskine on her debut novel, which deals with class, rape and parenting
Driving down the Cregagh Road in east Belfast, after the Museum of Orange Heritage, the eye is inevitably drawn to the gauntlet of union flags lining the street, which perhaps obscures the shift from middle- to working-class housing. Some things never change, you might think, yet you'd be wrong. It's perfectly safe nowadays to park your southern-reg car on a side street. The author Wendy Erskine lives nearby and has taught English in a local secondary school since 1997 (including to fellow author Lucy Caldwell), and Caffe Nero is an auspicious location. Michael Magee won the inaugural Nero debut fiction prize for Close to Home , his coruscating portrait of post-Troubles but still troubled Belfast. Erskine's equally powerful debut novel, The Benefactors, similarly captures a city no longer overshadowed by political and sectarian violence, allowing light to shine instead on other social ills such as violence against women and class divisions. The title relates to several disparate groups, evidence of the layered nature of the work. Misty, a young working-class woman whose sexual assault by three middle-class teenagers is at the heart of this novel, has an account on an OnlyFans-style website called The Benefactors or Bennyz. Bronagh, whose son is one of the boys guilty of rape, runs a charity dependent on wealthy American do-gooders. She also colludes with the two other mothers in buying Misty's silence, dressing it up as a goodwill gesture. There are also those who do the right thing for no financial reward, such as Boogie, who takes on the responsibility of raising his daughter, Misty, and her half-sister, Gen, when their mother absconds. READ MORE If the lives portrayed are sometimes difficult, the reading experience is anything but, leavened with a dry Belfast wit and benefiting from a sharp authorial eye and ear. 'Humour is so much a dimension of life that not to include it seems like a decision,' says Erskine. 'If you don't find it funny, it's very bleak.' Erskine's gift for authentic and entertaining dialogue is matched with one for deft and memorable characterisation, honed and displayed in her two short story collections, Sweet Home (2018) and Dance Move (2022). [ Wendy Erskine: 'There's a real high that comes from having written a short story' Opens in new window ] Her second collection's epigraph from William Blake – 'Joy and woe are woven fine/ A clothing for the soul divine' – could serve as a recipe for her fiction. She also approvingly quotes her literary hero, Gordon Burn, who imagined his artist friend George Shaw 'painting the back room of the social club in Tile Hill with all the seriousness of Monet painting Rouen Cathedral'. 'There is real brutality but also a lot of fun and joy in life,' she says of her literary sensibility, influenced by Burn's fearless focus on life's sleazy, tawdry underbelly. 'There is also an attention to detail, the specifics of people's worlds. I'm asking the reader to collaborate with me. You have to trust the reader, that they can cope with complex characters, a tolerance for people being contradictory. If you try to smooth it, you lose what makes them realistic. Of course, if they are just a jumble of contradictory elements, that also is not realistic. 'Specificity is not just verisimilitude,' she clarifies. 'If it were just to provide a mimetic facsimile of reality, then what's the point, why not just look at some photographs? It's about creating worlds.' She quotes Zola: ''Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.' I'm nosy as hell, I'm always noticing, listening, paying attention. I'm really interested in people, in structure.' She is not afraid to move beyond realism. The handover scene is inspired by Sergio Leone's westerns. One of the women even bursts incongruously into song. The Benefactors is about two worlds colliding. 'It's about sexual assault but that's only part of the book because so much is about what it means to be a good parent, it's about class, money, love, charity. And then cut into the novel we have 50 first-person monologues. I didn't want 50 different perspectives on what happened that night. I wanted a really polyphonic, kaleidoscopic, experience of a place. 'These voices are there to refract the central concerns of the novel. It's always struck me how arbitrary it is who you focus on as a writer. One writer might focus on those people sitting over there, somebody else the person serving. Often when I'm reading I'm going: okay, so I'm listening to your conversation but I wonder what that waiter is thinking. It's to give a broad, complex consideration of a particular place.' Each time you write a story you have to re-establish a world, even if it is quite geographically circumscribed. It's quite tiring Erskine's creative approach is to start with ideas for a character, which she has described as like playing with coins in her pocket, wondering what to spend them on. The novel has traditionally been regarded as a bourgeois form, privileging the individual over the collective, which some left-wing authors have sought to challenge by focusing on a group of people working together. So I wonder how much her diverse, multi-voiced approach to storytelling is down to methodology and how much to ideology? 'Although I wasn't conscious of it, I think there is something in what you are saying,' she says, although her initial impetus was more practical. 'I'd written maybe 30 or 40 short stories and I wanted to write a novel. I thought I would like to reside in the same world as my characters for longer than six or seven weeks, for maybe a year. Each time you write a story you have to re-establish a world, even if it is quite geographically circumscribed. It's quite tiring. I know that sounds ridiculous but it's like building a stage set, then striking the set. 'I didn't want to write a novel that could have existed as a short story. I know the form is super flexible but at same time there are limits. You can't deal with five characters' entire existences, you certainly can't put in another 50 people. I knew there would be a complexity of voices and something formally quite radical. I didn't want a wee chamber piece with a super narrow focus. I knew I wanted to do something radical.' She was aware of the risk that readers might switch off, tiring of having to recalibrate to a new perspective in each chapter, but she likes a more challenging reading experience. 'A good novel will teach you how to read it. I'm not a driver – I failed my test seven times – but I know when I get in the car if the driver knows what they're doing.' The sexual assault at the centre of The Benefactors recalls the high-profile 2018 Belfast rape trial , whose defendants were acquitted. 'It would be extremely disingenuous of me to say I'd never heard of the rugby rape trial,' says Erskine, 'but I've lived in this city most of my life and so I'm aware of any number of different trials and experiences that aren't to do with trials, of what happens in people's lives.' She is all too aware that the North has a bad reputation for misogyny and violence against women. 'I can't remember the statistics but this is not a good place. An extremely high number of women were killed by partners in their home. In terms of social attitudes, this place is traditionally behind others, with a lot of internalised misogyny.' She highlights how prejudice is not universal and intersects with class bias, rendering working-class women more vulnerable to abuse. But the sexual assault was not the starting point. The genesis of the novel was two characters, Frankie and Boogie. 'I wanted people from different backgrounds to be brought somehow into close proximity. That became a sexual assault.' In the initial stages, the book consisted of lots of little shards of memories just floating around in her head – 'I have a houseful of empty notebooks' – such as a YouTube video of a guy putting Mentos into a bottle of Coke. 'I liked that guy's attitude to having fun with kids. I wanted to write about someone who is an unlikely but really good parent.' Erskine dislikes didactic storytelling. 'I don't like fiction that has huge designs on me, or where characters are used as vehicles. They have to take precedence. I know it sounds a bit Mystic Meg, but you have to allow characters to push back,' rather like actors taking issue with the script. But there are times when Erskine and her creations are singing from the same hymn sheet, such as when the wonderfully potty-mouthed, born-again Christian Nan tells Misty, her great-granddaughter, that the boys who harmed her 'are not our type of people'. The divide she is reinforcing is not the North's usual tribal Catholic-Protestant one but the class divide. 'I really enjoyed that conversation,' says Erskine. [ In the Kitchen by Wendy Erskine: consider the clutter Opens in new window ] One of the 50 random, anonymous voices that insert themselves between the traditional chapters also feels like Erskine's philosophy shining through. 'Mate, let me tell you, I got to the stage of life where, if it's not about love to some degree, then I don't want to know.' She agrees, adding: 'That's on the No Alibis tote bag'. A debut novel backed with its own bookshop merch. Time is not linear and Erskine is passionate about the ever-present nature of the past and how it influences, even dictates, her characters' thoughts and actions. She scorns the notion of a character having a backstory as some kind of optional extra. 'For what I do, it's just a word that doesn't work. To my mind everything is simultaneous. There is no such thing as past.' Instead we have flashbacks or separate timelines, where we see for example Frankie being groomed as a teenager in care, learning to look after herself but becoming hardened to the extent that, when she in turns becomes a stepmother, the child in her care feels like an orphan. Structuring the novel proved an interesting challenge. 'A much more traditional structure would be to have the sexual assault come in the first third. I wanted the novel to be almost like a bowtie, that well-known literary term. You've got all these people, trust me on this, it all comes together, then it all goes out again.' The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas interested her as a model. 'In The Slap, there are eight different narrative points of view, constructed as a kind of relay, one coming after the other, each advancing the story. At no point do we return to the point of view of an earlier character. Whereas, in The Benefactors there is a rotation. We have Frankie, then Boogie, then Miriam, then Misty, then Bronagh and then we return again to their perspectives at various points. 'I also think just generally it's like The Slap in that a central incident is used to hold together a consideration of a range of preoccupations.' So much of what I understand about how to write, structure, conceptualise relationships, I learned from Chekhov She originally planned for the 50 anonymous voices to bunch in the middle 'like a choric interlude' but that didn't work so instead they are scattered throughout. Miriam, another of the mothers, is grieving her late husband, complicated by the knowledge a young woman was with him in the fatal car crash. The novel she is reading is 'full of young women's non-problems'. 'Miriam had expected a kind of cool and expansive perspicacity, but this is juvenile solipsism.' What might seem a sassy diss on Erskine's part is in fact in character for Miriam, who has a grudge against young women generally. By contrast, when Bronagh mocks Donal for a poetic turn of phrase, Erskine owns it. 'What some people think of as fine writing is very misguided. It's like the Dolly Parton thing: It takes a lot of work to look this cheap. My dialogue is edited over and over to get it just right.' This reminds me of Erskine's appreciation of the austere beauty of a whitewashed church wall in contrast to the Baroque's excess. 'I used to get migraines all the time, and when I came round I felt euphoric, looking at a white wall my husband was painting and Lonely Sad Eyes by Them was playing,' she says. 'I honestly regard that as one of the high points of my life, the simplicity of it.' Kathryn Ferguson has directed a short film scripted by Stacy Gregg and starring Aidan Gillen based on Erskine's short story Notalgie, written for The Irish Times. She has written an essay on Pasolini, another on fashion, a film script, several stories and 20,000 words of a new novel, about a Vanity Fair Becky Sharp-style grifter in mid-Ulster in the late 70s.' [ Nostalgie, a short story by Wendy Erskine Opens in new window ] Erskine wrote an unpublished novel in her 20s but was almost 50 when her short story Locksmiths won her a place on a Stinging Fly writing course in Dublin taught by Sean O'Reilly. 'But so much of what I understand about how to write, structure, conceptualise relationships, I learned from Chekhov.' [ Locksmiths, a short story by Wendy Erskine Opens in new window ] Contemporaries she admires include Adrian Duncan, Will Ashon, Svetlana Alexievich, fellow teacher-writers Elaine Feeney and Kevin Curran, 'people who just do their own thing'. She had studied in Glasgow, then taught in England, but personal circumstances brought her back to Belfast. Her goal had always been to return to Glasgow 'but as it turned out I love living here, it's beautiful, compact, there's a real energy here, in terms of writing, the arts, it's such an interesting place. The deep structures are obviously problematic.' What would make it better? 'On this particular road, a bar!' The Benefactors is published by Sceptre on June 19th
Telegraph
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Northern Ireland's most exciting novelist – who's making her debut in her 50s
To her pupils, she is still Ms Erskine, head of English at a Belfast secondary school. But a mid-life foray into fiction writing now means Wendy Erskine has a second identity as one of Northern Ireland's hottest new authors. So instead of discussing a Greek myth with a Key Stage 3 class or something by Tennessee Williams with her A Level students, Erskine, who is 57, is in London to discuss her own debut novel. The Benefactors is a polyphonic narrative about Belfast, class, parenting, and the aftermath of a sexual assault, served up with an undertow of politics. 'The Troubles is in the deep structure [of the book]. To me, it is in the deep structure of life in Northern Ireland,' she tells me, sipping a coffee in the basement cafe at The Ragged School, a Victorian free school set up by Dr Barnardo. Her novel is the latest in a wave of cultural lodestones drawing attention to Northern Ireland. She reels off a list, which ranges from TV dramas such as Blue Lights and Derry Girls to the controversial rap trio Kneecap, notorious for their inflammatory political messages. Books such as Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing, Anna Burns's Milkman and Michael Magee's Close to Home also come to mind. 'They have all been instrumental, one way or another, in developing a greater awareness of the place in all its strangeness and sadness and energy and beauty,' she says, the spit of 1970s-era Debbie Harry, with her blonde blunt fringe, her green short-sleeved sweater a perfect match with the cafe's artily peeling walls. This doesn't mean The Troubles are having a cultural moment, she adds. 'With respect, we're talking about 3,500 people having been killed.' In her novel, 'the benefactors' of the title are a group of parents trying to atone for their sons' crimes. Benefactors is also the name of a sleazy website – also known as Bennyz – where men make payments, or 'beneficence', to women for talking dirty and more. 'This place, the Ragged School,' she says, pointing to the room we're in, 'is celebrating something good but I'm also looking at the more pejorative dimension of the benefactor. The idea that the benefactor is getting something out of [their charity]. That they're possibly on a bit of an ego trip.' 'Beneficence. Sounds so fancy,' thinks Misty Johnston, a central protagonist in the novel, whose Bennyz profile is based on the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Johnston's Bennyz outfit is a white blouse with a lace collar and black satin ribbon bow to stand out from the booty-short-and-bra-top-wearing girls, although she draws the line at copying the Victorian poet's actual hairstyle – 'like she had just got a really good curly blow dry, except someone had flatted it on top… She's hoping to make at least a little bit of cash,' Erskine writes, her deadpan humour one of the book's many joys. (Her Instagram bio – 'lady writer not on the TV' – is a play on the Dire Straits song, Lady Writer. 'I was poking fun at my obscurity,' she says, smiling.) Double-edged narratives are Erskine's forte, something she discovered by chance in 2015 after using her free Monday afternoons to take a six-month fiction workshop run by Dublin-based Stinging Fly magazine. She 'fell into short story writing' after Declan Meade, the Stinging Fly publisher, asked her to put together a collection. 'I was 49 and I knew this was a one-off opportunity. I tried to appear all dynamic and said, 'I could write you a story every six weeks.'' The upshot, Sweet Home, which was set in east Belfast and published in Ireland by Stinging Fly Press in 2018, was a searing success. A second, equally lauded, collection, Dance Move, followed in 2022. Short story writing hadn't appealed initially. 'You know how people talk about them, the silversmithing metaphors: every word in its place, burnished. I found that really off-putting.' But they were a 'pragmatic choice' because they didn't take long. 'It's a very democratic form. If you have stuff going on, there is a satisfaction in getting a short story completed. And I absolutely adored it. I realised how flexible they are.' What they weren't was 'rookie prep' for a novel – at least not intentionally. What changed was wanting to stick with the same characters. 'I thought it would be gorgeous for me to get to reside in a world for longer than six or seven weeks,' she says. Her familiarity with the short story form also pushed her to try something different with her novel, which features cameos from 50 different voices reacting to the book's central drama, a sexual assault. The floating first voice eases us into what happened. 'When I heard them talking the other week in the shop, about that girl Misty and those three rich guys, to be fair I didn't know what to think, I mean, Bennyz and all that, but when I checked her out online she was nowhere near as slutty looking as I thought she'd be.' A second fragmented voice describes the house where the assault occurs. 'The weeping cherry is, to my mind, the most elegant tree… There is one in the neighbouring front garden. Sad to say, in that house some boys are meant to have taken advantage of a young girl,' Erskine writes, before turning to one of the main characters, Frankie, who is stepmother to one of the 'rich guys' named by the first voice. 'I didn't want a novel I could tell as a short story. I wanted something energetic and complicated with a cacophony of voices,' she adds. 'It's arbitrary who writers choose to be their central characters. Often when I'm reading, there will be a scene between two characters in a cafe, and I'm wondering what the waiter is thinking or the person at the next table.' It's an absorbing and clever structure that feels fresh and exciting, rather like Erskine, who makes me long to be re-taking A-level English provided I get her as my teacher. Have any of her students read her work? She laughs. 'I don't think I've ever had a conversation with any pupils about my writing. Worlds end up being compartmentalised.' In a quirk of the Northern Irish exam system, which may help to account for their superior share of top grades compared with England and Wales, students can choose two of the novels they study for A-level English. 'They have to get approval from the exam board but I'd be delighted and thrilled if they wanted to read The Benefactors,' she says. Erskine, who is married with two grown-up children, admits trying her hand once before at writing something long-form, when she was living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, teaching English after studying at Glasgow University. 'But it was dreadful,' she says. Now, though, she seems to be on a roll – with two film scripts, more short stories and another novel on the go, there is plenty more Erskine to come. She is sanguine about finding success in her 50s. 'This whole idea of the wunderkind thing, I love that, it's absolutely great. But I would query someone's judgement, to be honest, if they thought that the most exciting fiction was more likely to be written by someone under 35. Like, why? But neither do I think that older writers have universally achieved Zen wisdom. It just depends on the individual.' She adds: 'I think things have changed. There is more of an understanding that literature, that art in general, isn't necessarily the province of the young. I'd get very excited if someone in their 60s had their first novel out. That's a wow. That's interesting. I don't think [my stories] are young people's stories. 'I don't think this novel is a young person's novel. At the same time, that's a very seductive narrative to tell yourself, that things could only have worked out the way they've worked out. But you can't go back.' The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine (£18.99, Sceptre) is out on June 19
