Novel written in a VW campervan makes Man Booker longlist

There is no room on the Man Booker longlist for literary giants such as Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Don DeLillo. But a first-time novelist who has just completed an online course in creative writing and likes to work from a VW campervan called Skye perched on the cliffs of the north Cornish coast is in the running for the prestigious award.

“I had no expectations that it would be published or that anyone would review it let alone that it would make the Man Booker longlist,” said Wyl Menmuir, whose book The Many is a strange, troubling mix of mystery, horror, sci-fi and suspense set in an isolated fishing village on a contaminated sea.

Menmuir, a 36-year-old father-of-two, did not bother taking the initial call telling him he had made the list because he was having coffee with his 90-year-old grandmother, and when the news finally reached him, he expressed shock and disbelief that he was even in the same competition as one of his heroes, JM Coetzee.

But when he sat down for an interview with the Guardian he seemed to be getting used to the idea. “The book is everything I wanted it to be. I have belief in it. I’m thrilled to be on the list,” he said.

Menmuir, a literacy consultant and freelance editor, should be an inspiration for anyone who has dreams of writing a book but feels they don’t have time.

He decided he wanted to be a writer when he was six or seven and met the author Robert Westall, best known for his second world war novel The Machine Gunners. “I realised there was a person who had actually written that book. He was an ordinary guy like me and maybe I could do that.”

But Menmuir was in his early 30s when he tentatively began what became The Many at the Arvon centre in Devon, a manor house retreat, where he took a course called Starting To Write Fiction.

He carried on with it as part of his long-distance masters degree at Manchester Metropolitan University and finished with the support and wise counsel of fellow members of the global authors’ community Write Track, who kept him on course. He also used an app that allows a writer to monitor their progress to get him across the finishing line.

“I need someone to tell me: ‘Come on, you’ve got to finish it’. There’s too many reasons not to finish, other work, family, kids – things that are easier than writing a novel.”

It helped hugely when his wife, Emma, got a job at Truro high school for girls and the family moved from London to Cornwall three years ago. “It’s brilliant for writing. You get a lot more headspace. It meant I could spend a lot of time travelling to fishing communities like Newlyn, Mousehole and Cadgwith. I did a lot of talking to fishermen about the minutiae of what they do – the nets they use, the fish they are pulling out, what would be the case if this or that happened in the sea.”

He has imbued his book with the oddness of some of these communities. “They are picturesque places but there’s an edge there as well. Cadgwith, for example, is full of second homes and it’s quite a strange place to be out of season.”

A sense of being on the fringe is also important to the book – hence his penchant for writing in Skye, the campervan at the water’s edge.

“Sometimes I’ll take the van down to the beach or up on to the cliffs, away from people, away from the internet and sit on the floor and write. Being close to the sea is important to me and was important to the novel. I wanted to get that sense of being right on the edge of something.”

He was surprised when he finished The Many and amazed when it was taken up and released this summer by the small independent Salt Publishing, which is also based on a coast, the Norfolk one.

Menmuir has started his next book. “It’s very different but it’s starting to take shape. I’m exploring ideas and I’ve got a couple of short stories on the go.”

And if he were to beat Coetzee and the 11 others on the longlist and win the Booker? “It would be unreal. There are those things you don’t dare to dream. Winning the Booker is one of those things I wouldn’t have dared dream of. If it did happen there would be a degree of excitement involved … That’s an understatement.”