“Novelists get to the heart of things; journalists can’t,” said Blake Morrison speaking recently at University College Falmouth. Heather Hosking tells all.

Are journalists essentially different from novelists then? Blake Morrison should know. A slight figure with abundant wavy hair - steel grey these days, apart from a white streak at one temple - Morrison has enjoyed a long career as a professional writer and been acclaimed not only as a journalist and novelist but also as a poet, author of non-fiction, playwright, screenwriter and academic.

Morrison is best known as the author of non-fiction - perhaps for the prize-winning memoir of his father, And When Did You Last See Your Father? - some credit him with beginning the life-writing genre. But poetry was his first love, and his first job was at the Times Literary Supplement writing book reviews. For 11 months beginning in December 1978 and following a strike by print unions, The Times was not published, and he was paid for doing nothing. The writer said modestly that because better people had moved on, he then became fiction editor. He went on to become literary editor of both The Observer and The Independent on Sunday, and in 1995 became a full time writer.

Real life stories

In the 1980s Morrison was both appalled and fascinated by the activities of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. As a Yorkshire man Morrison knew the places where Sutcliffe had committed his crimes. The press reported the facts copiously, and yet, Morrison says, he had a sense that something fundamental was being missed. In 1987 his poem ‘The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper' was published. It used the Yorkshire dialect, and by doing so the poet felt he had come closer than others to understanding the murders. In particular, he discovered how misogynistic the local dialect was. Lack of respect for women was rooted in the language.

Morrison’s father died of cancer in 1991, and during the last weeks of his life Morrison kept a diary. Later, this record and incidents he could remember from his childhood became And When Did You Last See Your Father?, published in 1993. It is a moving recollection of a particular man and the author’s childhood, but the memoir transcended the personal, dealing with issues that resonated with many people. It was also in 1993 that Morrison was asked by The New Yorker to cover the trial of the two boys who murdered two-year old James Bulger. Here was another crime that attracted huge press interest, and the same sense that something fundamental was missing. Having sat through the criminal proceedings, Morrison felt that “the papers brought no understanding.” One comment did make an impression on him - from a defence lawyer: if ten-year olds have the same comprehension as an adult, said this man, why do they not sit on juries?

Morrison decided to write a book about the case. As If was published in 1997. His research included exploring attitudes to children and crime down the ages, and retracing the route taken by the ten-year-old killers when leading James to his death. Morrison spoke of finding himself in a narrow alley on the home patch of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. Seeing this place, and recalling details from the trial, made him realise that the boys had created what was, for them, an insoluble dilemma. They had walked miles with James, holding his hand, playing games to amuse him, shepherding him across busy roads, but if they wanted to avoid getting into trouble with their mothers, they had no choice but to head up the embankment to the railway line. “I was”, said Morrison, “reclaiming the case for ordinary people. Getting away from the idea of absolute evil and the faceless reporter. Opening the case up again, with subjectivity.”

Writing the gaps

Following the death of his mother, Morrison wrote a memoir of her life. Things My Mother Never Told Me came about after he found letters written by his parents, both GPs, to each other. It was published in 2002. He admitted that there was a gap in the exchange of letters that he had to fill, and while reflecting upon his methods, revealed that, for narrative effect, he had also changed the sequence in which events happened when writing about his father. Morrison is clear that it is the task of writers of non-fiction to deal with the truth, or at least “the truth as you understand it.”

Grown-up writing

Morrison has also written novels, and says he regards this as “grown up” writing because he finds it hard to invent a universe. Certainly some of his fiction has also been inspired by real events. The last novel to be published, South of the River (2007), described sometimes as a "state of the nation" novel, deals with fictional events the author imagines taking place on five particular days during the period 1997-2002. It begins on the day Tony Blair became Prime Minister for the first time - a day Morrison remembers as being full of hope - and ends just before the Iraq war. His latest novel, The Last Weekend, will be available in May 2010 and has been described as a tale of friendship, jealousy, sexual passion and revenge.

These days Morrison is also Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College. While speaking at Falmouth, Morrison took particular care to emphasise that his experience as a writer has taught him the benefits of editors. After such a varied career Morrison also recognises how writers in various forms differ, but also what they have in common. Journalists and non-fiction writers must write the truth. Others, particularly novelists, can create imaginary worlds. All, he said, “can explore the issues of our time. There are different forms and different ways of writing, but all writers are addressing the things that concern them in their own time.”