https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/17/hunting-for-mountweazels-eley-williams-on-the-fun-and-responsibility-of-dictionaries

Williams’ PhD about fictitious dictionary entries led to an acclaimed short story collection and now a novel. She talks about nonsense words, sexuality and the wonders of Wikipedia

Eley Williams has always loved dictionaries. That love shone throughout her dazzling, acrobatic 2017 collection, Attrib. and Other Stories, which savoured words and wordplay with an irresistible enthusiasm. The debut catapulted its tiny publisher, Influx, on to prize lists and heralded the arrival of a singular new voice.

It all dates back to her childhood, when Williams’s family kept a pile of dictionaries by the kitchen table. “Once you start looking words up it’s very easy to ricochet from column to column, falling down a rabbit hole … I got ‘precocious’ in a school report and I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. I thought it was probably a very good thing.” She continued to ricochet around the columns throughout her school years, even starting her own dictionary of neologisms as a teenager, inspired by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s The Meaning of Liff. As time went on, she became more and more fascinated by the idiosyncrasies of a branch of knowledge that sets out to fix and codify meaning. “The concept is so ambitious … there’s something humane and sympathetic in the fact that we’ll always fall short, but something extraordinary in that we’d ever attempt it.” She wrote a PhD about fictitious entries in dictionaries, part of which has become her eagerly awaited debut novel, The Liar’s Dictionary, out this month.