Peter Cowlam

Peter Cowlam is the author of literary fiction, plays and poetry, and has travelled extensively. His last major research trek — a few years ago — was halfway round the world, to Auckland, New Zealand. Here he took the opportunity to track down the first writer and scholar to be granted unlimited access to the Nabokov archives, VN’s biographer Brian Boyd. A mildly epiphanic moment arrived at a reading in the Dead Poets Bookshop on the Karangahape Road, where one of Brian’s ex-students, a fixer and bibliophile, was able, he said, to arrange a meeting. What was sought was a seat at a café table, where Brian would drink his latte and indicate whether, in his opinion, The Original of Laura, the novel VN was working on at his death, would ever be published. Nabokov died in 1977, having issued strict instructions that the manuscript be destroyed. For reasons too complex to elaborate on here that latte was never drunk, and Peter returned to his life in the UK, where for its two and a half issues he edited The Finger, a journal of politics, literature and culture. He has two novels in print, and more recently a novella, Marisa. His latest play, Who’s Afraid of the Booker Prize?, is published by New Theatre Publications. He is, incidentally, very happy to learn that after its thirty years in storage in a Swiss bank vault, The Original of Laura will be published by Penguin later this year.