In 2003 she served as a judge for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the UK's largest annual literary award. She has also been on the panel for the South Bank Show arts awards, the Ben Pimlott Prize for political writing (2005), the Guardian/Penguin photography competition for cover art (2006), the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction, and other awards. Literary festivals where she has spoken include Prague (2003) and Hay-on-Wye (2005). In 2008 she served as a judge for the Orwell Prize (for political writing).
Before moving to the Guardian she was literary journalist at the Financial Times and theatre critic on the Evening Standard. She married the British novelist Ian McEwan in 1997.
Annalena McAfee: 'I see myself as a recovering journalist'
Annalena McAfee finds it 'nerve-wracking' crossing over from journalism to adult fiction. It probably doesn't help having a husband called Ian McEwan…
Annalena McAfee looks apprehensive. Having spent most of her adult life writing about books, interviewing novelists, editing books pages and judging literary prizes, she is about to publish a novel of her own and it feels "nerve-wracking, to be honest". As a journalist, she loathed picture bylines and was happy to hover in the background. "So putting out a book of my own, I feel it's a bit like volunteering for the stocks and handing out the rotten fruit – you know, 'Go on, pelt me.'"
McAfee's novel has already generated considerable interest among her former colleagues and it is easy to see why. For one thing, it is all about them. Called The Spoiler, it is a newspaper-industry satire and a very entertaining one too, in which she pokes wicked fun at the louche behaviour and slack moral code of Fleet Street's finest and lampoons the obsession with sex and celebrity that pervades even the poshest of newsrooms. Insiders will have much fun trying to guess which real-life figures the most outlandish characters are based on.
There is another reason for the attention. McAfee is married to Ian McEwan, which in the celebrity-mad world she so wittily sends up makes her pretty much a celebrity herself. She laughs demurely when I bring this up and says: "I would be very daft if I thought people both inside and outside the media wouldn't pay attention to the fact that I'm married to him, so I guess I'm going to get a bit more coverage because of that. Not necessarily good coverage, but that's the difference it will make. I do feel a bit more exposed than I might otherwise have done but it would be churlish to complain. If people are going to look at the book because I'm married to Ian then I'm not going to snatch it from their hands and say that's not appropriate."
We're talking in the serene and elegant drawing room of McEwan and McAfee's lovely house in central London. It's all pale stone floors and deep leather sofas, everything in shades of cream and brown. There is a Howard Hodgkin painting above the fireplace, a Bridget Riley to the right and – unsurprisingly – books everywhere, stacked on the ceiling-height shelves lining the walls and piled neatly on surfaces and tables. McEwan famously used the house as the location for his 2005 novel, Saturday, and is said to have based his touchingly uxorious portrait of the protagonist Henry Perowne's wife on his own spouse. (His description of Rosalind Perowne's face – "a perfect oval, with eyes of pale green" – fits McAfee perfectly.)
They first met in 1994 when she interviewed him for the Financial Times but did not become a couple until the following year, after the collapse of his first marriage to Penny Allen. "I still have the interview on tape," McAfee says. "But I've never played it since – I always cringe at the sound of my own voice." They married in 1997 and McAfee became stepmother to McEwan's two sons, William and Gregory, then aged 14 and 11. She supported him through a bitter custody battle with Allen, who at one desperate point ran away to France with the younger of the boys in defiance of a court ruling. The courts eventually awarded McEwan sole custody of the children.
By this time, McAfee was an assistant editor at the Guardian, where she founded and edited the Saturday Review. Her career as a respected arts and books journalist had by then spanned more than three decades, taking in the FT, the Sunday Times and the Evening Standard (as well as the more humble Tottenham Herald). She had been a judge for the Orange prize, the Samuel Johnson prize and many other literary awards. "I loved almost every minute. It was fun, always fun," she says. "But I've only ever met one journalist who didn't want to write a book and I am no exception to that." She had written a number of well-received children's books, including The Visitors Who Came to Stay (about an extended family not unlike hers and McEwan's), but never managed to find the "mental space" to write an adult novel. So in 2006 she resigned to write full-time.
It was perhaps inevitable that McAfee's subject matter would be newspapers. "I see myself as a recovering journalist. I am a print addict. I have an ebook and a computer but I remain hooked on print. I read somewhere that Tom Stoppard, who worked as a reporter on a Bristol paper many years ago, still reads the UK Press Gazette. I'm exactly the same."
She had already written a fragment of a story about an ageing female war correspondent looking back on her life, which she showed to McEwan. He encouraged her to develop it. The elderly reporter became Honor Tait, the central figure of The Spoiler, whose ongoing encounters with Tamara Sim, an ambitious young writer of celebrity gossip, provide a rich vein of comedy.
There is pathos, too, in the older woman's obsession with trying to stay young and beautiful, which leads her to Harley Street for plastic surgery and other humiliating medical procedures. It's not a mindset that McAfee shares. She had cancer twice in her 20s and 30s. "So when people complain about getting old I really don't feel the same way," she smiles. "When another birthday comes around I think, 'Hooray.' Wrinkles and bits dropping off here and there hold no fear for me. I'm still here – that's the main thing."
The book is set in 1997 on the eve of the general election that ushered in Tony Blair and New Labour. Why then? "I was hugely interested in the technological transition that was about to be made. In a way, it was a prelapsarian age before the advent of the internet, which sent circulations spiralling into freefall.
"Like most journalists, I'm a real admirer of Michael Frayn's Towards the End of the Morning, which describes the twilight of Fleet Street as a physical entity when television was coming and newspapers ceased to be the senior service, as it were. What I wanted was to describe a comparable time of arguably even greater change for journalism when nobody knew what was coming. It was a time of transition politically, too – the Tory regime was coming to an end and there was a fragile hope in the air. I wanted to capture that as well."
Although barely more than a decade ago, the time she describes seems like another era, a forgotten world of boozy lunches and capacious expense accounts. ("We could have taught those MPs a thing or two about fiddling expenses," McAfee says, only half joking.) She thinks it is harder for us to remember relatively recent history than things that happened far longer ago. "I mean, can we imagine a world now without universal mobile phones? Can you remember trying to put coins into a call box? It wasn't so very long ago that there was no email. The changes have been so swift and they were mainly unforeseen. Even some of the most respected commentators in the land thought in 1997 that the internet was just a passing phase."
The Spoiler's satire is biting but also fond. "My feelings towards the newspapers are very affectionate. You could say they wield too much power without responsibility and sometimes one feels a species shame for the bullying, prurience and political dishonesty that goes on in some quarters. But overall I hope I'm not too harsh. I might come back looking for a job one day."
I ask tentatively about the downsides for a fledgling novelist like herself of living with the man who is arguably Britain's foremost fiction writer, but she cannot think of a single one. "It sounds unbearably smug but it's very companionable and not at all competitive. It's a shared interest, it's one of the things that drew us together," she says.
Most days, she and McEwan work quietly in their separate studies three floors away from each other. With his children now grown up, there are few distractions. "We are very good at ignoring each other during the day and getting on with our work. He is a very good role model in that way. We might see each other for a sandwich at lunchtime but that is all." Come the evening, they discuss the day's progress over dinner and McEwan finds it helpful to read his new work aloud to her. "I'm a very appreciative listener," she says. He, in turn, is always her first reader.
She has already started her next book, or is at least "nibbling at the corners of a new one". She won't say what it is about, only that it is definitely not about journalism. "I've got to try and move on – hopefully this book has got it out of my system, at least for now."
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