Resident Judge Paul McDonald

An Interview

The great thing about the Rubery Prize is that it welcomes a broad range of material - different forms of writing, different genres, and the widest imaginable range of styles and themes. Its eclecticism is a joy for me, partly because it exposes me to writing that I wouldn't normally read. This has been a profoundly enriching experience, both intellectually and creatively. Every year there's at least one book that changes the way I think.

This has been a profoundly enriching experience

Discussing work with other judges is also hugely rewarding and enlightening: I’ve been fortunate to work with numerous gifted, insightful readers over the years who invariably see things that I miss, often forcing me to rethink and reevaluate. It’s essential to have more than one critical perspective, both for one's own peace of mind and for the integrity of the prize. A healthy and meaningful competition is one that includes dialogue, and the potential for disagreement and compromise.

Advice for Writers is to only submit your best material, and try to be realistic about how your work compares to successful published writing in your field. If you can see obvious flaws in your book, then we’re likely to spot them too. However, if you truly believe in your work, my advice is to enter it - you'll be up against stiff competition, but if you're shortlisted in a particular category it will be a major achievement of which you can be very proud, and it will be a fillip of your career.

Some authors assume that there's something wrong with their writing if they don't win... or at least feature in the shortlist. This is not the case.

I think some authors assume that there's something wrong with their writing if they don't win a competition, or at least feature in the shortlist. This is not the case - while Rubery judges are always highly qualified, evaluation is a subjective business, and decisions reflect personal preferences to a large extent. There'll often be numerous high quality contenders for a shortlist, and work of undoubted merit won't make the cut. Shortlists are a reflection of what appeals to a judging panel, not of an author’s worth.

My Writing

I would describe my early creative writing style as overtly comic. I think my work has become subtler over the years, less conspicuously humorous, at least judging by the number of people who say ‘I prefer your early, funny stuff’.

When I first began writing creatively, I had more success with comedy than with any other form, so it made sense to pursue it. Most of my prose fiction remains humorous in intent; humour features less in my poetry, although this often has a comic dimension too. Certainly I enjoy it when folks find my work funny, assuming they're laughing for the right reasons! Either way, I believe humour is a fundamental facet of my personality, and I can’t imagine it not being a feature of my creative life at some level.

I spent most of my working life as an academic, and I've treated creative writing exclusively as a hobby. This is useful psychologically because, when I don't write, I don't feel guilty; it's also useful financially because I don't starve to death either! However, once I start a book project I tend to spend all of my free time on it until it's finished, then I invariably vow never to start another one! Poetry is a little different: I tend to have fallow periods when I write no poetry at all, followed by periods of maniacal versifying; I usually have enough good poems for a new collection about every five years. I’m slightly more prolific since I retired from

academia, but not much, as my retirement coincided with the emergence of Netflix…

I became known as the Joke Boffin

About 20 years ago I was commissioned by a TV company to research the oldest joke in the world. The joke, a Sumerian proverb, went viral, and for many years googling ‘the oldest joke in the world’ threw up hundreds of web pages with my name on. Hence I became known as the Joke Boffin - not the most flattering appellation for an academic. The oldest joke is about breaking wind, and as a result I became weirdly and widely associated with farting. For instance, I appear (as myself) in a feature length film about farting called FART: A Documentary. In many ways, this project feels most ‘me’ - occasionally amusing, but often very embarrassing.

When I began writing I made the mistake of submitting work for publication before it had been through the full imaginative process, and it was frequently rejected. Learning to edit and redraft my work transformed it, and my success rate. This may sound obvious, but it took me years to see the connection between revision and success. I'm pretty slow on the uptake (by the way, this paragraph has been redrafted several times).

There is certainly a relationship between my creative and critical interests, although to some extent the former often shape the latter. For instance, I have a scholarly interest in literary humour, although I was drawn to humour creatively before I began to study it in a scholarly way. I also enjoy writing micro-fiction, and I’ve written a book about its history and poetics, but again my initial interest in the form was creative rather than scholarly. The process of writing critical books meant that I read a lot more creative material for the purposes of research, of course, and reading is always good, deepening one's appreciation of a given form. Also, criticism forces one to read analytically rather than passively, and this has increased my understanding of how writing works.

We all respond to writing in our own way, and there's rarely a single point to my creative work that I want people to get, or take away; I'm thrilled if they're entertained, and ideally I'd like them to give me a big hug, or, better still, a huge cheque, although I'll settle for them not suing me.

Other Writers

The writers who've influenced me most tend to be those I've written books about, and many of them are humorists. I've published work on Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, and Lydia Davis, for instance, and they've all affected my creative work - Roth’s themes of guilt and social estrangement, Heller’s sense of the absurd, and Davis’s comic minimalism. I’m a huge fan of stand-up comedy too, particularly American confessional comedy of the 1950s and 60s, like Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Woody Allen: I’ve learned much about the rhetorical possibilities of humour from them.

Rubery is a significant cultural endorsement

Competitions like Rubery are crucial in my view, not least because they offer independent and self-published writers a way of raising their profile in a burgeoning and competitive literary marketplace. Success in prestigious competitions like Rubery is a significant cultural endorsement that’s hard to achieve any other way. It’s so easy for important books to go under the radar in the modern world, to the detriment of literary culture, and the dismay of writers who may feel there’s no chance of achieving the recognition they deserve.

Mainstream presses have become largely inaccessible to the majority of writers, as publishing decisions are increasingly determined by commerce and cultural fashions. When I began writing 40 years ago, I believed that genuinely good writing will always eventually find a publisher. If that was ever the case, it certainly isn’t now. Over the years I’ve seen countless gifted writers ignored by mainstream presses, and indie and self-publishing has been their only route into print. Small presses make an essential contribution to literary culture in this respect, broadening the literary landscape beyond the bottom line. This is likely to continue as technology enhances publishing possibilities for independent writers: democratising access to marketing platforms, lowering production costs, and offering affordable ways of producing well-designed and professionally edited books. So, as long as there’s a readership for good books, the future looks bright for independent and self-published writing.

Paul McDonald was Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Wolverhampton for 25 years, where he specialised in American literature and ran the creative writing programme. He is the author of over 20 books, including criticism, fiction, and poetry. His selected works include Surviving Sting (2001), Kiss Me Softly, Amy Turtle (2004), Do I Love You? (2008), The Philosophy of Humour (2012), Storytelling (2014), Enigmas of Confinement (2017), Lydia Davis (2019), Allen Ginsberg (2020), Don’t Use the Phone (2023), and 60 Poems(2023). He has won prizes in numerous competitions including the Morecambe Poetry Festival Prize (2025), the Vole Books Poetry Competition (2024), the Slipstream Poetry Prize (2023), the East Riding Poetry Competition (2022, 23), Liverpool Poetry Prize (2022), the Wolverhampton Literature Festival Poetry Competition (2022), Sentinel Poetry Short Story Competition (2015), the Sentinel Poetry Competition (2013), and John Clare Poetry Prize (2012).