Novelist's desperate, lacking time and energy to break into television (8)
I believe the answer is:
turgenev
'novelist's' is the definition.
(I've seen this before)
'desperate lacking time and energy to break into television' is the wordplay.
'desperate lacking time' becomes 'urge' (I can't explain this - if you can you should give a lot more credence to this answer).
'and' becomes 'n' (common abbreviation for 'and').
'energy' becomes 'e' (physics symbol as in E=mcr).
'to break into' means one lot of letters goes inside another (inserted letters break into the word).
'television' becomes 'tv' (abbreviation).
'urge'+'n'+'e'='urgene'
'urgene' placed into 'tv' is 'TURGENEV'.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for turgenev that I've seen before include "Ivan -------- (1818-1883), writer about Russian life as in Fathers and Sons" , "Ivan -, Russian novelist (Fathers and Sons)" , "Dramatist" , "Ivan -, Russian author (A Month in the Country)" , "Russian author (Fathers and Sons, Virgin Soil)" .)