The moves seem monumental, but they are radically incomplete. Two truisms stare at each other like twins: you can’t go home again but you can’t entirely leave home, either. The narrator of O’Hagan’s first novel, Our Fathers, hopes to move to his own metaphorical New Town, ‘the world of all possible lights’, but he also writes: ‘The child you have been will never desert you.’ To which both that novel and the new one seem to wish to add: and the parents we have had will never let us go. Or will they? I have known Tony from our theatre days in Glasgow in the 90s and time in LA (where I also met Martin). Though we have never worked together I have always admired him as an actor. He was a total joy to work with as was Martin Compston. It is such a sensitive subject and being very aware that most people unfortunately have had some kind of personal knowledge or experience of cancer, we wanted to be as honest as we could be which required a tremendous amount of focus. Both are very receptive and open as actors with a lot of humility and humour which made the shoot a lot easier. That story is more poignant, I suggest, because their friendship already had a happy ending – they both, in different ways, had made good on their pact of deliverance. That journey, the gap between the two halves of O’Hagan’s book, is still fairytale in some ways, isn’t it? Most of the best advice he ever had as writer, he has said, came from Mailer. “He knew the industry could make writers soft and silly – hungry for recognition, when the real task was to enter your times and write your heart out and never settle for having the correct opinions.”

It’s a drama based around relationships and friendships. The main characters are two old friends who have been best pals for decades and one of them gets life changing news. He plans to act on that news and enlists the help of his best friend. It’s set across two timelines and is by far the most emotionally challenging job I’ve ever done. It was critical to film Mayflies in Scotland. The story in the novel is set here, it is written by a Scottish novelist and the themes, whilst universal, also have specific geographical Scottish social and political nuance. It was vital to make authenticity a central part of the show so there was no other option to film it anywhere but Scotland and with mostly Scottish cast and crew.There is certainly nothing self-congratulatory about O’Hagan’s fourth novel, Be Near Me (2006). Like Our Fathers and The Missing, it describes in devastating detail the effects of the collapse of heavy industry, but attention switches from Glasgow to a small town in Ayrshire, following the loss of coal mining, a chemical plant, a steelworks and an armaments factory: ‘Men worked in those places for forty years and at the end of it the Jobcentre was trying to turn them into Avon ladies.’ The fact is that both approaches are possible, as Orwell understood. Fifteen thousand words of The Missing appeared in the Guardian, while, not long after publication, the then literary director of the Traverse theatre in Edinburgh spoke about a stage version. I went to see him a dozen years ago, but I just didn't feel ready to write it: I suppose I was still a little haunted by the correspondences the book had revealed to me, and was keen to man the sails in a voyage out from there. I got cast... these things are never overly complicated. Bizarrely, when it came through to me from my agent, I was in a field in Budapest at an Arctic Monkeys gig. It was 1am and I thought I was tripping! Tony Curran, who plays Tully, has been one of my best pals for years so seeing his name already attached was exciting because I love working with pals. I mentioned the project to the journalist I was with, as I was doing a feature for the Big Issue, and his face lit up - Mayflies feels like a really well-loved book, especially by writers. I read the script and loved it. How did Synchronicity Films come to the project and how did you get involved as Executive Producer?

You might say that a certain amount of violence was accepted. And this was even more true of violence out in the street-organised violence- than of that taking place in people’s homes. A sense of some gangsters as surrogate guardians of their home patch’s welfare is still there today. It was common to feel that way, to see these little Caesars, these slashing bogey-men, these proto-Mafiosi, as ruthless hardmen, yes, but ones who had a certain concern for the values of the world they moved around in.” The Missing, part autobiography, part old-fashioned pavement-pounding, marks the most auspicious debut by a British writer for some time.' Gordon Burn, Independent In 2006, his third novel, Be Near Me, was published by Faber and Faber and long-listed for that year's Booker Prize. It went on to win the Los Angeles Times's 2007 Prize for Fiction. [7] In 2008, he edited a new selection of Robert Burns's poems for Canongate Books, published as A Night Out with Robert Burns. A copy was lodged in every secondary school in Scotland. Following on from this, he wrote and presented a three-part film on Burns for the BBC, The World According to Robert Burns, first on 5 January 2009. In January 2011, Scotland on Sunday gave away 80,000 copies of the book. Also in 2008, Faber & Faber published O'Hagan's first non-fiction collection, The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America, which was shortlisted for the 2008 Saltire Book of the Year Award. [8] It is exactly that,” O’Hagan says, “and I have never taken it for granted. The most dramatic ways out of childhoods like mine were boxing, a pools win, or making it in a band. My grandfather was a boxer, who died at 34. For our generation the most reliable was music. We could watch all those brilliant scallies like, say, Echo and the Bunnymen, become genuine heroes, creative, political, articulate. They showed us that it could be done.” While O’Hagan’s work perhaps takes risks in sustaining certain stereotypes of Scottish identity, his flair for engaging in rich and authentic social detail removes any predictability from his writing. And if the Scottish landscapes he draws are familiar from the work of fellow writers such as William McIlvanney and James Kelman, his specific focus on urban architectural history as a framework for his characters’ life stories is highly original.

In Mayflies, Tully and Jimmy’s first move toward getting out is to that music weekend in Manchester. The friends see The Smiths walking through a pub, where Morrissey “hit[s] the air like a chip pan fire” – a very 1980s simile, I point out. “I’m claiming it, the chip pan fire!” O’Hagan says. “The great chip pan fire novelist of the age!” We first meet Tully in 1986 in a Working Men’s Club where he’s with all his pals and singing in his band ‘The Sherbet Fountains’.

The Missing is given added poignancy by the author’s autobiographical identification with the children who have disappeared. In a prefatory ‘book’, O’Hagan details his own childhood in Scotland’s Clydeside, tracing his extended family’s recent past and its links to the area’s shipbuilding industry. He describes too, his own grandfather’s disappearance, at sea during a wartime naval battle, as the first in a chain of connection from one vanishing to another. Not only people but entire streets and districts of Glasgow itself have disappeared in the reconstructions of the post-war era. Such losses can only be recovered through family memories, for as O’Hagan explains, ‘[p]eople didn’t move around much in Glasgow, or, at least, they didn’t in the generations previous to my own, which has decanted and redeveloped in the usual modern ways. So to properly know your own family in an old city is to know something of the history of the city itself.’In 2012, O'Hagan worked on a theatrical production about the crisis in British newspapers, entitled Enquirer, with the National Theatre of Scotland. [10] Given the referendum on Scottish independence to be held in 2014, O’Hagan’s fiction may be regarded with increasing socio-cultural interest, as commentary on the evolving nature of Scottish and British identities and on relations between England and Scotland. In the introduction to The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America (2008) he writes of his perceived ‘disloyalty’ to Scotland that ‘A healthy literary culture would never expect its writers to reproduce the conceited forms of self-congratulation that every nation has at its disposal’, and the first essay in the volume duly delivers a stinging rebuke to resurgent Scottish nationalism and hollow, US-endorsed ‘Braveheartish banter’. ANI (22 February 2014). "Ghostwriter calls Assange 'mercurial character who could not bear his own secrets' ". Business Standard. A timely corrective to the idea that nothing profound can be said about now.' Will Self, Observer Books of the Year O’Hagan’s risk-taking stylistic confidence is again illustrated by his skilfully animated 2011 novel The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of his friend Marilyn Monroe. Taking cues from Cervantes’s Dialogue of the Dogs and Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography, the picaresque is written from the point of the view of a Maltese given by Frank Sinatra to Marilyn Monroe in 1960. O’Hagan’s gift for ventriloquism is demonstrated by a series of cameos by post-war American personalities, including Sammy Davis Jr., John F. Kennedy and Shelley Winters, and Maf’s elegiac observation of this strangely innocent era lifts the novel above whimsical self-indulgence.

a b Adams, Tim (30 August 2020). "Andrew O'Hagan: 'If you are honest, you never stop being who you were' ". The Guardian . Retrieved 20 October 2020. From the beginning of his writing career Andrew O’Hagan has pushed at the conventional limits of literary genre, blurring the boundaries between fiction, memoir, documentary and journalism.His most recent novel as of 2021 [update] is Mayflies (2020), which won the Christopher Isherwood Prize. Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil. About a third of the way through his first book, The Missing, Andrew O’Hagan pauses over a perception he thinks his readers may find ‘a bit surprising’. It’s an intricate moment, since he thinks we are going to be surprised at the surprise he is describing. He is telling us that people who moved from Glasgow to the Scottish New Towns springing up in the 1960s hadn’t expected to take so much of the old city with them: ‘the older habits, the darker tints’. Why hadn’t they? Because they didn’t want to. Because they believed in new things, and thought they could get a severance from the old. Few of the disappeared I identified in 1994 were ever seen again. And often what I was writing about was the grief of their families left behind, as well as the hope – almost always a fiction in the face of hard facts – that their loved one might be safe and well somewhere, ready to return home some day. Those families never got to put gravestones over their loved ones' remains, and I've thought of them constantly while introducing their stories into the ghostly space of Glasgow's Tramway theatre. It wasn't just an examination of social anomie, in the end, or even of a writer's personal journey: it was a dramatic hymn to those lost souls in limbo, and a call to know them as you might know yourself.