Graham Swift is among the very foremost of Contemporary British novelists. Since 1980 he has published a volume of short stories and seven novels, the great majority having been highly aCClaimed by reviewers and Critics and widely read by students and the general public alike (they are translated into over twenty languages). Two - Waterland and Last Orders - have also been made into films. Among other prestigious international prizes Swift's fiction has been awarded, Waterland - which rapidly established itself as a modern classic - received the Guardian Fiction Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour, and was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1983; Last Orders won the Booker in 1996; and Swift's most recent novel, The Light of Day (2003), was again included in the long short-list for that coveted prize. It is surprising, therefore, that while two or three of Swift's texts have received extended critical analysis, the overall character and development of his novel-writing career has, by contrast, been largely unexamined.

In a Guardian ‘Profile’ on 1 March 2003, immediately after the publication of The Light of Day, Swift is quoted as saying:

Furthermore, back in 1988, Swift is on the record as saying: ‘I don't believe in the autobiographical mode of writing’, reiterating this position in 1992: ‘None of my characters is me, I don't go around looking for material from my life to make a novel. Nor do I turn people I know into characters. Writing in the first person is a complete act of imagination’. Others who know him well (his long-term partner, Candice Rodd, for example, in the same Guardian ‘Profile’ above) also confirm that he does not do much ‘real-life’ research before beginning a novel but ‘imagines and surmises’.