The publisher Harvill Secker held an “International Writing Day” yesterday at Foyles bookshop in London, where contributors included AS Byatt, Joseph O’Connor, Tim Parks and Nicholas Shakespeare. But it was the Galician writer Manuel Rivas who sat longest at the signing table afterwards.
In part, this was a tribute to his performance earlier. A handsome man with a shock of silver-and-black hair, he manages to combine the presence of a rock star with the delivery of a poet. As he spoke, at first about his new work, Books Burn Badly — inspired, if that’s the word, by the Spanish fascists’ attempts to “save civilisation” by
consigning even Plato’s Republic to the flames — he was followed in English by Jonathan Dunne, so fluently that they seemed less writer and translator than a couple of singers who have been harmonising for years.
The other reason Rivas spent so long at the signing table was that he didn’t just squiggle his signature; with a few strokes of the back and sides of his fountain pen he turned each dedication (see above) into a little work of art.