“I’d really ceased to think of myself as a writer,” she says. “Sometimes I would feel that life stretched ahead but it was kind of blank and that was quite frightening.”Īn invitation on to the set of the BBC miniseries for Jonathan Strange in 2015 gave her the boost to start writing again. She was eventually diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, which at its worst left her housebound and depressed. “Having written about a woman with a 19th-century illness I then seemed to fall prey to a 19th-century illness myself,” she says. Six months after the publication of Jonathan Strange in 2004, when she was 44, she passed out at a dinner party and hasn’t been well since.
“We arrived back at the hotel and we just drank camomile tea and flopped.”Īs she explained in a tearful acceptance speech, this was a book she thought she would never be able to write. But not for Clarke the traditional bleary-eyed morning-after interview. I haven’t processed it at all,” the author says from a hotel room in London, after the ceremony (one of the first post-lockdown publishing bashes) the previous evening. An otherworldly study of solitude, celebrating everyday consolations and the comfort of nature, Piranesi appeared with uncanny timing just as we were beginning to emerge from a period of all too real isolation.
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