Graham Swift's new book

I'm currently reading Graham Swift's new book called Making an Elephant - not as you might expect, fiction, but a collection of essays, interviews and poems as well as pictures. I haven't always found his fiction that readable and struggled with Waterland even though it was set in the Fens, but this is something totally different. There are pieces about how he became a writer and about other writers including spending Christmas with Salman Rushdie while his life was in danger. There's also a touching tribute to his late father and an enthralling piece about visiting Czechoslovakia in 1989 and meeting dissident writers. I chose the book from the Amazon Vine programme which I belong to because it was billed as being about the writing process and indeed it is but it also reminds me of a commonplace book. It's well worth reading when it's published if you're at all interested in what makes and influences a writer.