Marina Lewycka and the 36 Rejections

This from The Guardian today.

Marina Lewycka was rejected 36 times before she finally found a publisher at the age of 58. Now A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is a worldwide hit.

Before Tractors, the only creative work she had had published was a poem in an Arts Council magazine about 30 years ago. Had she ever doubted that her dream would come true?

"I doubted it all the time," she says, "but writing was a compulsion. Lots of very good writers never get published, and that could easily have happened to me. People think that good writers will always come out in the end, but I don't believe that."

She says she had reached the point where she barely discussed her writing with her husband, a mining consultant, or grown-up daughter. "When you've been doing it for as long as that, it gets a bit embarrassing, so you don't talk about it very much…"

The whole article can be read at the link above.