Ruth Borthwick is in no hurry to talk about Ruth Borthwick. She would rather talk about a building, the one in which she spends most of her working days. And as buildings go, this one — admittedly — is no shack: it’s the Royal Festival Hall, and it will be shrouded in scaffolding, undergoing extensive refurbishment, until 2007.

Ruth speaks of the RFH lovingly, almost gushingly: ‘It’s probably the only Grade I listed building I’ll ever have the privilege of working in,’ she says. She is deferential to this building, dropping fact after enthusiastic fact, shifting conversation to herself only after 30 minutes of tape have rolled, and only because she has been coaxed to do so. And once the conversation does shift, some similarities between Ruth and the building she inhabits become apparent — and how well the two suit each other. Both have surprising histories, defined by unexpected twists and unlikely beginnings.

The Head of Literature and Talks at the South Bank Centre reveals that she came from a rural working class family and grew up in the south of England, where her father worked as a gardener. Her interest in books began with her father’s habit of taking her to the library once a week. ‘Each week I borrowed three books. I was particularly a fan of the Moomins,' she says. ‘I spent a lot of time on my own and read a lot. I even used to write little reviews in a scrap book.’

But Ruth renounced bookishness when she was a teenager. ‘I was a total rebel. There was absolutely no way I was going to read Mansfield Park. I thought it was the most boring thing in the world.’ She concedes, however, that she did enjoy 'The Prelude' by Wordsworth. ‘I liked Byron and Shelley too, as revolutionaries tend to do,’ she laughs. ‘But I was more interested in saving the world, and the way to do that was to grow vegetables organically and protest against nuclear power. And so I went off to do that.’

Eventually she decided to apply her revolutionary ideals to the book trade. She was especially interested in small presses and in ‘people having access to the written word, despite what big publishing houses said or did.’ This focus on access is a running theme in her conversation, and she says it comes from E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, particularly his description of the artisans and workers who created their own presses in the 18th century. So Ruth travelled to Australia to work in a feminist collective which managed the Communist Party bookshop in Sydney. ‘It was the first bookshop in Australia to have a gay section — which you can’t believe now. But in the early 80’s people would creep into the bookshop! We imported all the books from the States. I had a fantastic time there.’

When she returned to the UK her next project was to participate in the launch of Turnaround Distribution, a cooperative formed to distribute the publications of small presses to the book trade. Some of her early customers were Serpent’s Tail, Gay Men’s Press, Amnesty International, and Brilliance Books, a small gay publishing house where Jeanette Winterson worked. ‘We ran it as a collective,’ Ruth explains, ‘everybody did every job, so you’d be on the packing desk at the end of the week, and earlier you might be driving your little delivery van to rep Oxford.’ Her patch was Oxford and everything west of there. ‘I’d have a fantastic time in Oxford selling books, showing them what was new’ she remembers. ‘But then I’d have to go the wilds of Winchester, where people would be horrified even to be shown a book with, say, something Irish in the title.’ She pauses. ‘But in Oxford, in the 80’s, it was the heyday of Waterstones. There was an amazing buzz around the high street book trade. People were actually open to having 30 copies of a new title from Gay Men’s Press. It felt like a cornucopia. It was a very exciting time.’

Although she had abandoned academic interests as a teenager, Ruth’s resistance to higher education had softened by this stage, and she decided to pursue a degree in Cultural Studies at what was then the Polytechnic of East London. There she came to realize that the revolutionary ideals that had inspired many of her life choices could be examined through history, philosophy and, yes, even literature. ‘I suddenly realized that Mansfield Park was a fantastic book — that there were agendas and sub-agendas going on.’ And reading Edward Said was equally a revelation, she says.

Ruth wrote her final dissertation on Hanif Kureishi, a contemporary of hers with whom she feels a personal connection. ‘We both grew up in Bromley,’ she explains. ‘When I was a hippie, people like him were being bashed up under the bridge for being a so-called Paki. I decided to explore the effect of the National Front on his writing. Doing that dissertation showed me not just where he was coming from, but where I was coming from, too.’

After finishing her degree, Ruth spent several years working on literature projects funded by the Arts Council. Most notably, she and the poet/novelist Bernardine Evaristo succeeded in establishing ‘Spread The Word’ in Brixton, the now-celebrated and much copied organisation that focuses on work-shopping the writing of young, particularly black, writers. Working in Brixton and Lambeth helped to inform her perceptions of audiences who had often been ignored. ‘Did you know,’ she asks, ‘that the second most spoken language in Lambeth is Portuguese?’ And then, rhetorically, ‘How does one engage with that audience? Certainly the publishing industry isn’t doing that. Those are the kinds of issues I’m interested in.’

In fact, a glance at the South Bank’s Literature and Talks programme from this spring illustrates the diversity that Ruth strives for — Croatian, Chinese, African and Malaysian writers all appear within a single month. But even after five years in her job, she is ‘always interrogating the programme and thinking we have so many white men, where have we gone wrong?’ She quickly qualifies that — ‘Well, not really.’

She also refers to the compromises arising from working with publishers — ‘I can’t afford to fly Toni Morrison here club class from the US, so I have to engage with her publisher. But there aren’t too many Toni Morrisons around, and you’re more likely to be offered a very cultish best-selling author who is usually going to be white and male. But there has got to be a diversity of voices.’ She shrugs: ‘Sometimes the publishing industry delivers, but other times you’ve got to get out there and do stuff yourself.’

As an example of ‘doing stuff yourself’, Ruth tells how she co-commissioned, with Geraldine Collinge, a young emerging poet, Daljit Nagra, for Poetry International 2002, the biennial festival held in the Purcell Room. In preparation for that event, she brought him and three other young poets into contact with established poets who offered feedback and constructive criticism of the poems that these unpublished poets would eventually read from the stage of the Purcell Room. Ruth is particularly proud of this project, citing it as one of the things she does that can ‘make a difference.’ She speaks of Nagra almost as admiringly as she speaks of the Royal Festival Hall — ‘I want to see him publish a collection! If it were up to me, I would be hammering on the doors of publishers and saying ’Get on with it!’ And she regrets that she can not do more for other writers whom she feels the mainstream publishing industry ignores.

Asked which other contemporary poets she admires, Ruth has no difficulty answering. She quickly identifies Sinéad Morrissey and Colette Bryce, explaining that she has ‘a bit of a thing’ about poets from Northern Ireland. And she thinks that Don Paterson is ‘terrific’ too. How does she recruit writers to read their work to audiences? ‘Well, I work with publishers, of course, and I knew that Jackie Kay’s new collection was coming out this spring because her publisher sent me poems from the new book. And another way is to hear writers at festivals.’

Ruth goes to Rotterdam every year for their Poetry International, modelled on the one at the South Bank, and she also hopes to attend the festivals in Galway and Jamaica. 'I think it’s important to experience other ways of doing things,’ she explains. ‘And you don’t get ideas from sitting at your desk.’ In her office at the RFH, she admits that one of the biggest challenges she faces is working for a large organization where meetings can revolve around such subjects as ‘branding and marketing’, which can feel like a far cry from ‘untrammelled art that’s going to change you.’ Another challenge, she says, is funding. ‘There is never enough money. Especially public money: it’s always going to be drying up.’

That said, the Royal Festival Hall is currently undergoing the early stages of a £90 million refurbishment that begins officially in July this year, and consequently the last literature event this summer in the Voice Box auditorium will be in June. The work will take as long as long as the time required for the original construction of the building — 18 months. With enthusiasm, Ruth sketches the building’s history, pointing out that the Royal Festival Hall was built on a derelict site, straight after the Second World War, by people of 129 different ethnicities. It was constructed primarily as a concert hall for the Festival of Britain. She talks about the appeal this building has had for visitors from even the earliest days — partly because in the immediate post-war years, many people lived in such difficult conditions they’d flock to the Festival Hall for a concert, and then be reluctant to return to their less than delightful homes. Consequently, ushers used to form a human chain at the end of the evening, nudging people down the stairs from the top of the building down to ground level.

Only in the 1980’s did the Hall adopt an ‘open foyer’ policy, which Ruth praises because it creates ‘such an exciting and dynamic atmosphere. You don’t have to buy anything! You can even bring a packed lunch, sit in the foyer, or read, or go to the exhibitions! The building has an incredible buzz as a result.’

And how will the refurbishment and closure affect the literature programme? Ruth explains that the Voice Box will close altogether because a great glass lift will be built in that location. Another auditorium of comparable space will be constructed near the new Education Centre on Level One. ‘When we return to the RFH we'll be using the Chelsfield Room as a bigger and better Voice Box.’ Compensating for the absence of the Voice Box during the RFH refurbishment, there will be many more readings than usual in the Purcell Room over the next 18 months. Ruth estimates there will be two or three literature events there each month, plus a continuing number of grand-scale readings and talks in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, which currently clocks six or seven such events a year.

Interestingly, Ruth plans that the increased number of Purcell Room literary events will continue even after the reopening of Royal Festival Hall, because the South Bank Centre is committed to growing the literature programme — ‘it’s in the business plan’ — and ultimately there will be more readings and talks than ever.

She is also enthusiastic about the forthcoming opening of a Foyles branch on the ground floor of the RFH, the first Foyles store to open outside of the famous flagship shop in Charing Cross Road. ‘Foyles is committed to the quirkiness of our programme — in addition to books they’ll also be selling sheet music, things like that.’

However, on the downside, the Poetry Library will remain closed for the duration of the refurbishment because there simply isn’t the funding to move it to a different space. [See Librarian Simon Smith's article, 'The Poetry Library goes virtual' in the spring 2005 issue of Poetry London.] But there are hopes that the library may eventually have an even larger home on the site. ‘After work on the Royal Festival Hall is completed, the focus will shift to the other halls.’ Ruth muses on their future, imagining more performance spaces of varying sizes that would allow for ‘more participation from audiences, more debate and discussion.’

It’s this kind of energy and vision that drives Ruth Borthwick. Her career shows she is a person who dreams, makes things happen, and gets results.

Kathryn Maris, Listings Editor of Poetry London, has published poems and essays in journals such as Poetry, American Poet, Ploughshares and Poetry London, and in an anthology commissioned by the Academy of American Poets. Her first collection is forthcoming from Four Way Books, a publisher based in New York City. Born in New York and educated in the Northeast of the US, Kathryn has lived in London for six years.

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