Guest Post by: Graham Hancock
Author of Entangled: The Eater of Souls
Published by The Disinformation Company, New York
Graham Hancock can be seen on Sunday Oct. 10th of the festival at 5pm on the Columbia Sportswear Stage
Why Fiction? Why now?
Upon publishing my first novel, I thought it might be of interest to explore these questions.
I’ve been a nonfiction writer all my working life, starting out in journalism and working my way into books from there. My writing was always heavily facts-based, even if I was giving a different take on the facts from the mainstream. An example is my 1989 book Lords of Poverty: The Freewheeling Lifestyles, Power, Prestige and Corruption of the Multi-Billion Dollar Aid Business. It won an H.L. Menken Award honorable mention for an outstanding book of journalism. It was entirely fact-based, but it took the same facts the aid industry was using to blow its own trumpet and showed that there was a whole other story lying underneath them—a story not of “help” and “kindness,” but of corruption, waste, greed, and ego on the part of the donor organisations. Lords of Poverty was the first book really to question foreign aid. A lot of people in the aid business got very angry with me about it, but it struck a chord and is still in print twenty-one years later in the United States.