Karen Swan on Quick Reads and the escapism of reading

Publishing on April 11, 2024, The Reading Agency has announced that six best-selling authors will champion Quick Reads for 2024: Karen Swan, Kia Abdullah, Malorie Blackman, Matt Cain, Kit de Waal and Jo Nesbo. A mix of original and specially abridged titles, there really is something for everyone. Quick Reads helps engage the one in three adults who do not regularly read for pleasure and the one in six adults who find reading difficult.  

Karen Swan's abridged book The Last Summer (Pan Macmillan) is an epic historical romance set in the untamed beauty of the island of St Kilda in 1930s high society. We talked to Karen Swan to ask why Quick Reads is so important and why she chose an abridged version of the first book from her Wild Isle series for this year's programme.

I think any writer, before they become a writer is first a reader—you come to it through being a consumer of content yourself. When I look back on my childhood, I spent a huge amount of time in my local library. What I always loved was just that emotional connection of being able to disappear into a story, and not really have to think about it. You could just be, and that was what I loved. Now that I write, I sort of get to live in books, which is wonderful. Whenever I'm getting stuck, I just think, as a reader, what would I want to happen right now? I sort of come back at it as a reader rather than as a writer.

I just think that books can give you an escape from your everyday life. So, I do have a lot of readers, for example, who have cancer. And they find my books, because they're sitting in the chemotherapy chair for five or six hours in a day. And I've written a lot of books. If they pick up one of my books and they then see they've got 24 others to go, they often love it. And it's not because I'm the best writer in the world. But what I am able to do is give them escape from that moment that they're in, sitting in that chair, with a grim reality of having to have this put in your body. I can take them away from that just for a few hours. And so that's one example of being able to escape, just to be a different character, to travel through different identities. And I think that's so important to just walk in those shoes for a while.

That's why I think it really matters, that books should be accessible to everyone, regardless of where they've come from, where they're going to, and what's going on in their life. I think it’s part of the human experience—to have that comfort, feeling of escape and a new perspective. I think that what Quick Reads is doing is really introducing that to people for whom maybe books have been seen as a privilege, a luxury or just not for them—they don't consider themselves to be a reader.

There's no time for some people to read these days. The way we consume content has changed. Of course, now people can have audiobooks. The other day I saw this thing on social media talking about the trend of silent walking, as like a wellness thing. And of course, I realise that for them, for this younger generation, they're permanently walking around with their Airpods in. They don't know what it is to just walk out of the house and go for a walk for the sake of going for a walk. They have to have content.

But it’s wonderful because people are able to walk around listening to books. If you want to listen to a book, you know, because you're too busy and you're tired when you come in for work, then that’s fine. Listen to the book on the train, as you go into work. I think that the way we can access books is multifaceted. Now we can read digitally too. I'm still old school and I want an actual book in my hand.

It’s a very abridged version. The original book is about 110,000 words. Actually, my publishers commissioned a special editor to abridge it, because having lived in that world I created, I don't actually think I would be physically capable of cutting it down. When I was reading the edited version, I wondered how they did it, because it is a very specific skill, to be able to reduce that much material down to the core.

I think that the Wild Isle series is a good one because it is a series. If you can bring people in, then they are already invested in the characters and in the world you've created. It's then easier to pick up the next book, and then the next book, because you've got that way in. The book is set in 1930 but it feels very modern to me. I probably spent three or four months researching island life on St Kilda. The heroine of that first book, The Last Summer, her name is Effie Gillies, is very much a tomboy, she's a really wild spirit. They’re an isolated island community so she doesn’t care about manners and the rigid class structure that's found on the mainland. I think she’s an accessible heroine.

When I'm writing, I've not got one person in mind that I'm thinking about, but people say to me, “who is your reader?” Everyone! Yes, it’s largely women, but I do have men reading my books, and they're always slightly surprised that they enjoy them. That slightly irks me that the way the books are packaged. When you talk to people, almost invariably the biggest and most important stories are about love.

I think that what I'm particularly pleased about with Quick Reads, is it is going across the board. It’s going into care homes, so there will be people for whom the 1930s is recognisable. There will be people in hospitals, in prisons or women's shelters, or who just have never had these sorts of experiences that I'm writing about in my books, but I can bring that to them.

I think what's so exciting about this initiative is that I'm going to be reaching people who would not ordinarily think, I'm going to read a Karen Swan book. In a very short space of time, you're going to get a sense of what it is I'm trying to do. You might hate it and never pick me up again. Totally fine. Or you might love it and go read the whole series.

I get a huge amount of messages on social media and they're very humbling. I really mean that. I know I'm not going to change the world with my books. But what I do think I can deliver, and I think I do deliver, is I give people what I call a three-day mini break. For three days, roughly, people will read my books, and they're just immersed in it, and they live with those characters. And then they finish it, they might think about it for a few days, and then they move on to the next one. And that's brilliant, because that's that has its place in people's lives, because everyone is busy. And I have had messages that I have just thought, I can't believe that I was able to make such a positive impact to you.

One example is I had a lady write to me, after her daughter had died. I just cannot begin to imagine it, as a mother myself. And she said, reading this book was the first time she actually felt hope. I used to get quite a lot of correspondence from another lady who would contact me on Facebook and we’d chat. Then her best friend contacted me and told me that this woman had had cancer and she had died. I didn't know any of that. She lived in Australia. When she died, how there were certain things in certain lines in my books that her husband then quoted at her memorial service at the funeral service, because they had just resonated with her when she was facing very dark times. And that, to me, just made feel like I wasn’t qualified. With my next book, I dedicated it to her memory, and I sent it over to her husband and her best friend. It was all I could really do, but I wanted to sort of give something back because I was so honoured that I had made some sort of impact on her life.

I am loving doing the series as an intellectual exercise because carrying a plot over four books, you've got this prismatic experience of seeing it through four different characters. Everyone’s got their own truth, their own perspective, their own experience. So in each book, we come back to circumstances and we see them from another angle, which changes the story.

It's really interesting for me as a writer to do that. But it’s super hard. I'm not aware that there are any textbooks out there telling writers how to write a series, you know, so you have to sort of muddle your way through it. And that leads to a lot of fear, because until I've actually finished it, I don't know if I can pull the whole thing off. I've written now three out of the four books in the series. I've just started the last one but I'm very pleased with how it's gone so far. But trying to draw everything together with the last one, it could fall flat on its face. It keeps me awake at night thinking, can I actually do this? but I just have to trust in it.