Then, in 1991, I was judging a literary award. There is an unwritten rule that all literary award judging panels must, at some point, meet in the Groucho Club, so it was there that we met and argued the merits of the books we liked and defended the ones we did not. After the judging was over, I looked up and saw actor and comedian Lenny Henry at the bar. He waved me over. We knew each other a little, had worked together on Comic Relief the previous year. “I was going to call you,” he said. “Do you want to make a fantasy series for the BBC? I thought it could be about tribes of homeless people in London.”
I went home. I thought about it. I didn’t want to write about tribes of homeless people, mostly because I suspected I could make living homeless in London seem attractive or exciting enough that someone might try it. But what about turning it upside down: the people who fall through the cracks. A London that falls through the cracks…
Read the rest of Neil Gaiman on the creation of his novel, Neverwhere.
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