Graham Swift's archive acquired by the British Library

The British Library has acquired the archive of acclaimed novelist Graham Swift. The collection of 75 file boxes contains manuscripts, notes, revisions and proofs relating to all eight of his novels - including Waterland and the Booker Prize-winning Last Orders - his short story collection Learning to Swim and his recently published non-fiction collection Making an Elephant. The collection dates back to Swift's early work from the 1970s, and even includes essays written at Cambridge University (on Shakespeare, Donne, Tolstoy, and Joyce) and a composition on Hamlet written at Dulwich College in the early 1960s (the school-boy essay is marked 'excellent', although a reference to T S Eliot is marked by his teacher as 'terribly snooty'!)