‘Making it’: practitioners’ views on literary celebrity

This Forum offers a view on literary celebrity from professionals working outside the academy. As a deviation from the usual practices of Celebrity Studies, these Forum contributions are not intend...

Margaret Drabble begins by taking the long view of her literary career, probing her relationship to literary celebrity and her motivations for writing. With the descriptions of her careful management of public visibility and anonymity, Drabble's piece reminds us that celebrity attraction is contingent upon the biographical body of the author (Mole 2007, see also Harrington and Elliott in this issue). If public appearances are not carefully managed, the authorial body may become as exposed as the sticking plaster revealed on the Queen Mother's ankle when bestowing Drabble with her royal honour.
Katy Guest brings her years of experience as literary editor of the Independent on Sunday to her analysis of authors' proactive strategies for cultivating celebrity via social media (see Marshall 2010, Marwick andBoyd 2011), but she also highlights the tensions that emerge between establishing a profile through accumulating 'attention capital' (Rojek 2014, p. 456) and maintaining space, physically and psychologically, for creative work. Her account of how both publishers and fans stake their claim to the body of author George R.R. Martin, which becomes valuable only as a vehicle for delivering the next, much anticipated Game of Thrones volume, is a striking example of such tension.
Frank Wynne, who offers a translator's view of celebrity, exemplifies how literary celebrity is also a process involving multiple agents across multiple contexts. He focuses on the importance of both the translator and literary prizes in establishing authors' reputations across cultural contexts (see Spencer 2013, Braun 2011, 2015, but also illuminates the transnational network of other stakeholders, advocates and gatekeepers who play a role in the processes of celebrity making. Sridhar Gowda and Gaurav Somwanshi's joint article highlights how literary celebrity is also a product, one made available via the body of the author and the processes of celebrity for wider cultural appropriation. Their piece demonstrates how literary celebrity in India is often, in fact, a product of caste and linguistic privilege, thus offering a critical insider's and non-western perspective on cultural diversity in the book market (see also Sapiro 2010). Through the example of the neglected public intellectual, Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar, they show how systemic imbalances and discriminatory practices in publishing and media industries translate into imbalances in the material culture of celebrity in both India and the dominant English-speaking platforms of 'world literature'. In this way, the material culture of literary celebrity confronts us with the partialities and omissions in society in a way that exclusively textual readings of authors cannot.
The following Forum pieces throw light on the process of 'making it' as a celebrity in various literary worlds from the perspective of those living and working in those worlds. Through the lens of literary celebrity, they provide us with insight into the challenges faced by creative practitioners of different types, the ambiguities, tensions and contradictions of the systems they work in, but also a striking understanding of their motivations for doing what they do. As such, their contributions clearly demonstrate the advantages of incorporating industry and creative perspectives into the academic study of literary celebrity in order to continue to diversify the field of research and deepen understandings of the social relationships that underpin and sustain celebrity practices.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.