Art by Kiana Rezakhanlou, using ‘The Yellow Perch, Perca flaverscens’ (1898) from The New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Benjamin Wood has long been drawn to characters who are caught between fracture and glimmers of renewal.
His fourth novel, The Young Accomplice (2022), marked a turn toward postwar domestic drama. Set in 1950s Surrey, it follows two siblings—newly released from a borstal—as they are taken in as apprentices by an esteemed architect and his wife. What unfolds is a quiet reckoning with new opportunities and lingering debts: a portrait of young lives shaped by fractured trust, the weight of class, and the grip of institutional systems.
Wood’s forthcoming novel, Seascraper (July 2025), deepens his exploration of lives shaped by limitation, but relocates us to the fictional coastal town of Longferry. This time the focus shifts to a single figure: Thomas, a young man bound by circumstance to his grandfather’s trade as a shanker, eking out a life defined by tides and tradition. Thomas lives in the stillness between routine and longing. If The Young Accomplice grappled with the possibility of breaking free, Seascraper appears poised to explore the quieter struggle of staying put.
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CK: Do you see Seascraper as an extension of the themes in The Young Accomplice, or does it represent a departure in focus? More broadly, as a multi-novel author, do you find yourself continually exploring similar concerns in new ways, or is the new novel rather an opportunity to think entirely afresh?
BW: I try not to write the same book twice if I can help it, but I am probably enticed by certain types of dramatic scenario more than others, and that guides me into familiar narrative territories. I like to feel I can project myself into the life of the protagonist and to be certain I can render his/her experiences authentically — that limits the range of stories I can tell, and I have to do a lot of thinking about how to frame characters’ lives within the bounds of my own experience, understanding, or research.
I’d say that Seascraper is probably a distillation of all the themes I’ve explored in my other novels in some way, but it’s also very different from those books in tone and scope. It’s the most personal book I’ve ever written, being set in a fictionalised version of my hometown. (It’s also by far the shortest I’ve written to date.)
My novels tend to focus on working class characters who are either creative people in their own right, or who are drawn into the orbit of other creative people. I tend to be compelled to write about loners or outsiders, and I like to evoke the tensions that arise when they engage with people who are a bit more effulgent personalities than themselves. I’m not sure what that says about me as an author or a human being, but that’s as good a reading of my own work as I can give you.
CK: One functional similarity between the two works is the inclusion of characters whose lives are shaped by external circumstances. How do you balance the portrayal of these characters’ internal emotional worlds with the external realities they face?
BW: Thomas Flett in Seascraper is 20 and Joyce Savigear in The Young Accomplice is almost 20. They are connected by the fact that their lives have been partially determined for them by the problems they’ve inherited as children, and they’re both vying to escape the bounds of that inheritance in their teenage years. These similarities aside, they were two very different personalities to build on the page, because Thomas is a much more straightforwardly loyal and ambitious character: he’s steadfast to his grandpa’s traditional way of life as cart shanker (a kind of shrimper) and he’s committed to the job of keeping a roof over his mother’s head for as long as he can, suppressing his creative aspirations.
For me, developing the interior landscape of a character succeeds or fails based on how well I can project myself empathically as a writer into their circumstances, moment by moment, scene by scene. If I don’t know what a character is thinking or feeling in a given movement, I rethink the scene until I can determine their perception of events more clearly.
CK: Remaining with the point of internal worlds, A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better (2018) engages the intimacy of the first-person perspective—something that you moved away from in The Young Accomplice. How do these two different perspectives shape the way that you tell a story?
BW: With The Young Accomplice, I set out to write a multi-voiced third person novel because I hadn’t attempted to do that before — my first novel was told in third person limited, but it cleaved to one character’s implied gaze throughout. I wanted The Young Accomplice to switch between viewpoints, chapter by chapter. My aim was to explore the disparity of understanding between people who think they know each other well, and how those failings in communication or empathy can cause damage over time.
A first person narration is always limited to one character’s experience, which can be very helpful in terms of streamlining the narrative for the reader, focussing their attention on a single consciousness, but it restricts a lot of other dramatic possibilities and limits the scope of expression that’s possible for the author, too. First person narratives can sound a bit whiny and self-absorbed, if they aren’t handled with care. Sometimes, it’s the ideal fit for the story and it generates the exact tone of voice I’m looking for. At other times, it works against the story’s better qualities. Learning how to notice this is part of the battle of writing well, I’d say.
CK: I’m curious about how your writing process unfolds. Do you find that this choice of narrative voice—whether first or third person—shapes the development of your characters and plot from the outset, or does that decision come later in the process as the story takes shape?
BW: I tend to do a lot of mental groundwork. Writing the story from the wrong character’s perspective will only undermine the entire novel, so I feel justified in agonising over it at the beginning of a project for several months (up to a year sometimes). I like to be certain whose story it is before I put any words on the page. Then I just keep tuning the dial on my imagination’s radio until I find a crisp, clear voice that resonates. That’s my way of saying: I write a lot of opening paragraphs that never see the light of day.
The toughest part is being able to locate myself within that character’s voice. There have been moments when my writing is flowing so readily in a given narrative voice that I find it suspicious — later on, I realise it’s because I’m ventriloquising a personality that’s expressive but inauthentic, i.e. there’s no real emotional understanding there, only affectation of emotion. That’s the point at which I’ll kill the whole story and start again, or write something else instead.
CK: And beyond perspective, how do you approach the development of a new story? Do you begin with a central plot point, or narrative idea, or is there a different starting point that drives the story for you?
BW: It depends. Some books start with an idea for a character in a dramatic circumstance — e.g. The Ecliptic started from the voice of a narrator that had surfaced in my mind when I was on a residency in Istanbul, and it helped me to conceive of her whole character and situation. She became Knell, a jaded painter who is part of a group of artists who are hiding from their real lives inside a gated refuge on the island of Heybeliada. My first novel, The Bellwether Revivals, began with the premise of a gifted character who claims to heal people with music.
A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better emerged from the will to write about a father-son relationship and what it’s like to live in a household with parents on the verge of a divorce: I pushed that idea to dramatic extremes, which I often tend to do. The Young Accomplice was built mostly on a fascination with two things I’d read a lot about — Frank Lloyd Wright and the Borstal system — but it was also a product of my wanting to write about people’s capacity for goodness, having spent so much time writing about their capacity for darkness in my previous book.
CK: What did this process look like for the development of Seascraper? Of course, as well as being an acclaimed writer, you are a father and a Senior Lecturer at King’s College London, where you founded the PhD Creative Writing programme. How does writing happen amidst these competing priorities?
BW: I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to write another novel after Seascraper, because I had begun to lose the joy I used to derive from writing fiction before I started it. I think my experience of shielding at home for health reasons during Covid sparked an existential despair in me for a while. I just couldn’t get enthused about fiction at all — writing my own, or reading anyone else’s. I made a conscious decision in the end to write something I felt sure was interesting to me, regardless of whether it would be interesting to anyone else. And I committed to that contract I made with myself.
Seascraper was written longhand in a notebook (almost entirely), sitting on a bench in a garden of remembrance near my house, and that change in my customary practice reinvigorated me, too — it helped me find the joy of writing fiction again, the experience of being immersed completely in the process. I’ll probably continue to write books this way, if the weather holds.
I’ve always written alongside my teaching commitments, so that wasn’t any more difficult to manage than usual (it was a bit exhausting, but no match for the draining existence Thomas leads in the novel). Raising children well is the toughest challenge there is in life, and, like novel writing, the effectiveness of your methods is best judged by others. I just try to do both jobs as well as I can simultaneously.
CK: The Camera is a Cambridge-based publication. I note your first novel, The Bellwether Revivals (2012), is based in the city, and that you spent a period of time here when writing. How does the environment influence your practice, and having been here early in your career, was the time you spent in Cambridge in any way foundational to your current approach?
BW: I’ve come to realise that I can’t get a novel off the ground without having a clear sense of its setting and — more importantly — a grasp of the atmosphere of the particular place and time I’m writing about. Seascraper is the most salient example of how I like to build story and character around the mood of a story’s setting, but The Bellwether Revivals was the first time I ever realised how vital it was to my entire approach to fiction.
The first scenes I ever wrote of Bellwether were set in Vancouver, which was where I had been living for almost three years when I began writing it. I changed my whole conception of the novel on the night I moved to Cambridge, when my good friend Adam (a postdoc at Downing College at the time) took me to hear the choir at Trinity College Chapel — I think he only took me there because we had an hour or two to kill, and he suspected I’d get a kick out of it. Neither of us are religious people. Hearing that choir had a profound effect on me,and I knew right away that I had to revise my story and set it in Cambridge. I wasn’t a student there, and I felt like an outsider, so I tried to use that experience to shape Oscar’s viewpoint as much as possible. When I alighted on the idea that Oscar could be a care assistant at a local nursing home (I grew up above a nursing home my parents owned and ran), the novel found its focus and momentum.
I loved living in Cambridge, and I stayed there for three years, which is how long it took me to write The Bellwether Revivals. They were the foundational years of my writing life, because I was taking the pursuit of becoming an author seriously then, while working a part-time job in London. I had no real social life, I just lived in a box room in a house-share on Catherine Street, adding words to my novel every day until it was done. I still love returning to Cambridge now and then for that reason. It reminds me of what I achieved with the time I spent there.
CK: Considering your diverse roles — writer, teacher, and father — as you look ahead, are there particular challenges or creative directions that you’re keen to explore, or is it more that each new project will reveal its own course?
BW: I always threaten to write a sequel to the last book I wrote, but no one ever seems to share my excitement for that! Still, something appeals to me about writing a cycle of short novels about the same character, or set within the same place. As things stand, my mind is still auditioning ideas for the next novel and seeing which one moves me first. I’d like to explore other dimensions of my creativity more seriously in the year ahead: writing screenplays, writing a children’s book, writing a memoir. Songwriting is a major element of Seascraper, too. It’s something I’ve always done quietly in the background since I stopped chasing record deals in my early twenties, and I can’t seem to give it up — I still have notions of pursuing that more purposefully. I guess we’ll see what happens.
By Caitlin Kawalek
Benjamin Wood’s newest work, Seascraper, will be published by Penguin Viking in July 2025.
The Camera 