HEATHER MARKS: Hi Jacob, hi Ashley – it’s great to be speaking with you both. As writers at different stages of your careers who have had varied roles within the literature landscape – how do you feel you have changed as writers, and how are you still the writer you were when you started out?

JACOB ROSS: That’s a great question, I was thinking about that last night. I grew up under a dictatorship, in the 1960s and 70s in the Eastern Caribbean, Grenada. And if you know anything about Grenada, you know it was invaded by the Americans, not very dissimilar to what happened to Venezuela recently. That experience was quite seminal in my understanding of society, poverty, and women in society (having grown up in a massive extended family where there were hardly any men), and these themes persist. They haven’t changed in any fundamental way. What has changed for me is that I moved to England, and an examination of the society struck me quite hard. It’s something that Salman Rushdie says – when Britain left the colonies, they didn’t simply leave the colonies, they took the colonies with them. That was his way of explaining the kinds of racism, institutional barriers, and attitudes that we encounter. The whole superstructure was always there, and the colony is still here. So, I still find myself addressing that in my writing and being immensely preoccupied with it.

If there’s been one big change, it’s something I did completely arbitrarily with my book that won the Jhalak Prize. I wasn’t previously interested in crime fiction as a writer; I was interested in it as somebody who reads and enjoys people beating other people in books sometimes. But I was challenged by a student in my class because I made a bold claim that if you understand the structure of novels, you can write in any genre – and so she challenged me to do it. We didn’t have crime fiction in the Caribbean to any large extent, so, I never expected to get any kind of acknowledgement for my involvement in crime fiction. I was always seen, and I’d always seen myself, as a literary writer in the sense that I write the kind of things associated with African Caribbean writing. So, that represented a massive turnaround for me.

HM: I love what you’re saying around the purists getting upset now that you’re writing in this genre, because there’s so much of that around now. Just being writers of colour in any genre, when you bring yourself into it, that upsets them.

JR: Yes, if you are to address any type of English writing, or what people refer to as English writing; be it a form, be it fantasy, crime fiction, whatever it is. If you’re serious, as a writer, you have to look at what it’s telling you, where it’s come from, its tradition, what are the assumptions (and so many of them are still racialised assumptions that you encounter in the writing). You have to ask very hard questions of this form, because it’s not yours. It’s not mine. It’s not even theirs, frankly speaking, because the English and the Europeans claim to have invented the novel, but they didn’t. The Chinese did, in 1610. That, again, is quite controversial, but what I’m getting at is that for me, I cannot, as a writer, simply adopt wholesale the English idea of the novel, or indeed of a short story. It’s a denial of so much. It’s a denial of our own narrative traditions, and the way we tell stories. It’s a denial of the authenticity of our articulations. It’s an acceptance, which I don’t accept, that there is only one narrative tradition in the world and it’s a Eurocentric one. That’s not true.

ASHLEY THORPE: I think there’s a lot of crossovers for me. The difference is I’m very early in my career, so I’ve got two published books out now, and they were back-to-back 2024/25. I am a child of immigrants – my grandparents moved from Jamaica, rather than Grenada, in the 60s. I was born in the late 80s. My parents decided to raise me and my brothers in an area of Nottinghamshire that was outside of the city centre. For whatever reasons, they thought it would be better to have us out of the city, so we grew up in a suburban/semi-rural space, which was incredibly white. And while I had the freedom and the imagination to play, and I still had the connection with my cousins who were in the city centre, we grew up in a space where we encountered a lot of racism, and we weren’t quite equipped for it. So, when I think about my earliest writing, as a child, a lot of my characters were what I was reading, it was all white children. I was never centring myself in a story.

It wasn’t until I was about 8 years old that I found out Malorie Blackman existed and was finally able to see myself in books. But in the books that I was reading often, especially in the fantasy genre, I would never see characters like me, so that’s what I would write. As an adult now, I’ve maintained the imagination and continued to write, but the big difference is making sure that I’m centring characters of colour. I write for the middle grade space, but the thing is, I’m also writing for myself as an adult so I can pass on a lot of the things that I’ve learned, and wisdom I think I’ve gained in my lifetime. It’s also to make sure there is a mirror for kids, who, like me, enjoy fantasy stories and letting their imaginations run wild, but are not able to see themselves. So that’s why I specifically centre Black children in all my fantasy stories. Also, similarly to what Jacob was saying about the Eurocentric-ness of writing here – the fantasy genre is terrible for that. It takes a lot to try and break down certain boundaries in that sense, especially in a demographic where it’s parents that buy books, not the kids. People bring their biases to that as well, so it is harder to have Black kids on the cover of a book in Waterstones. People will make their assumptions, and they’ll go for what they see as safe, and often that safeness is not black characters.

It was so imperative that I wrote about what I really wanted to see in the literary space. That kids were deserving of heroes in fantastical spaces, not just in ‘urban’ situations or whatever the industry likes to call them. It was important to me because I didn’t really have that, and I want kids to have that now.

My first book, The Boy to Beat the Gods, was a fantastical version of pre-colonial Nigeria, and it delved into the lore of the Orishas – for some publishers, this would be seen as a risk, really. My second book, Spirit Warriors, is a fantastical version of a Jamaica where Maroons fought off the British with magic. Again, a big risk, and I don’t think it would have sold if I had gone with that as my first book. My writing is really this fine balance of putting things out there that I know kids are going to enjoy with adventure and action, with real histories and mythologies hidden in them. Hopefully, kids will be so enthralled with the story that they’ll want to go off and study about these things themselves as well.

I’m glad I’ve got published work now as a late 30-something, rather than in my early 20s because I feel like I’m a more rounded person, and I think that gives the writing a lot more of an emotional core.

JR: Ashley, I have two children who were born in this country. They’re adults now, and I’ll tell you this – when they were growing up, I wish there had been writers like you writing about characters with which my children could have identified. It’s one of the great problems that parents had, especially those of us raising children in the 80s and 90s, had: trying to locate books for our children where they see themselves on the page. I’m not saying this in any political way at all. In a way, it’s telling them, ‘You don’t matter,’ or it’s telling them, ‘You’re not there, you don’t exist.’

That’s why writers like yourself are so important. You’re strategic and you represent a very important cultural and psychological intervention. And, it is political in that sense, not because you are being political, but because for these generations in minoritised groups in this society, you’re giving them a sense of worth, a sense of value. A lot of how we perceive ourselves is to do with the stories we are told. Stories represent the cement of civilisation. We all tell stories, even if it’s a newscast, even if it’s a debate; that’s a narrative, it’s a story. So, I do recognise, and you don’t have to necessarily accept this, but I recognise the central strategic aim of writers like yourself.

HM: It’s interesting what you say around risk Ashley, because I was thinking about how writers of colour are seen as risky in publishing. I’ve been writing from a very young age and I’m now in my early 30s. I think of some of the young writers who get scooped up by a publisher who wants to have the new, hot, young thing that’s on social media – that person just gets thrust into the industry without having been able to get a sense of what’s genuine and what’s BS. Can you talk to me about how knowing yourself more, means that being published later works for you?

AT: I think I would describe myself as something of a late bloomer, certainly in terms of full confidence. But coming into my 30s, I would say it has been my finest decade. It has been the point where experience has met a level of self-assurance.  I feel like I’ve just been better placed with my values at this point of life to tell the stories I want and write the books I want to write. With a bit more self-assuredness and a bit more willingness to make sure there are no compromises with certain things. I’ve been very lucky with my publisher and my editor especially, in that they’ve really loved the stories I’ve written and believed wholeheartedly in me and my ability.

My thing is just to write the stories that I 100% believe in and I think need to be in the world, and then I’ll fight my darndest to make sure it gets the coverage and the traction it deserves. Thankfully, the awards seasons have backed up my belief, and that’s helped massively.

HM: Even as we have ideas for stories and we write them, and pitch them to agents and publishers, suddenly we’re met by these forces outside of us: the market analysis, the trend forecast – the way things are in trade publishing. For you as a writer of colour writing something speculative about the afterlife of slavery or about African mythology, those outside forces have an impact on how your book is shared, if it’s shared at all.

Jacob – how do you keep a level head on this axis of writing the story you want, versus it getting published?

JR: In my view, we’re talking here about the dynamic between authenticity and conformity. The only tranche of writers who have to do that kind of delicate negotiation are writers coming from minoritised cultural spaces. Your average mainstream white writer doesn’t have to worry about representation on the page, and they can get as fantastical as they want. Nobody questions that. There are two things which I have understood after working for around 40 years in the publishing industry as an editor, as a journalist, and so on. One is that the British reading public is far ahead of the publisher’s understanding of what they are prepared to read and consume. I have always thought that. The idea of the marketing avatar that they have is female, probably has disposable income, middle aged, lives somewhere out in the suburbs. I have a lot of colleagues who are very prominent writers in this country, and we’ve all had the experience of being pushed to integrate within our work a certain kind of stereotype that they have of our characters. They cannot, and they wouldn’t, do it with me, but if you were to take my last book, the one that won the Jhalak Prize, and follow the logic of our understanding of what’s happening in the publishing industry, that book should have never have actually succeeded. It should have failed, for the simple reason that my characters are all black. But what the Jhalak Prize did which was a game changer for me and for that book, was to flag it as a book that people have read, and people have judged to be very good regardless of the difference. So, a lot of people from all kinds of spaces began to read the book, and the feedback was fascinating. For me what was interesting about that was the public – the one that the publishers and the marketing people do not see as they are – were prepared to read a book completely out of the containers that they were placed in. These readers were much more open-minded than the publishers gave them credit for.

So that reticence that I get from the mainstream publishers, is a very interesting one. The people who run that particular industry – they’re all middle class. Many of them have had a certain kind of education, they have a certain kind of reading taste, they have a certain kind of understanding of literature, and they bring that to bear on the books coming from a completely different reality. They judge them using those filters. That’s my view, personally. I’d rather not be published than to conform to certain kinds of dictates from publishers. There are certain kinds of stereotypes I’m not going to integrate in my work, because it’s a betrayal of the people I know. We all have dignity, we all aspire for our children, we all have ambition, we feel hurt, we feel pain, we fall in love. So, who dares tell me that it’s improbable that my characters can feel love, or can have certain kinds of relationships, and have a certain quality of intelligence.

The second thing is that in a hundred years’ time, when a black child (in the broad political sense) looks back, they can see how minoritised people like us lived. They can see how we thought, our intellectual activity, the intellectual history of the people from whom they spring, from whom they have grown. That’s really where the danger is, in my view, when writers adopt narratives, adopt characters, adopt writing, because they want to make money (although I do understand that). When you read the book, let’s say in 50 years’ time, you really don’t have a sense of the culture, the society, or the community that the characters have come from. What are the specificities – I’m looking at you, Ashley – that have made you yourself? It’s a conflation of so many encounters and personal histories, and your story is your story, but it’s a story that I will identify with and one that other people would understand. How were you made to feel about your body, about your physicality, about you occupying space?  This is one of the reasons why if anybody dares tell me that I should write a certain kind of book because it is more digestible to a hypothetical audience, I’ll push back. What’s the sense of me writing in the first place? What am I here for? Because for me, I expect every writer to have a sense of mission and to know why they’re writing. I hope it’s not only for money.

AT: My reason for writing is kind of twofold, really. Let’s put aside my own sense of satisfaction and the fact that this is the thing that makes me feel fulfilled. It’s also, as we’ve already mentioned, making sure that children, minority children especially, can conceive themselves in a fantastical space, and not only a contemporary space in literature. The flip side of that is to tap into that universal truth about the human condition, and the fact that if you’re a majority kid, then you also need to have a window into these other worlds so you can learn more about it. At the end of the day, these are still adventure stories about heroic kids, and it just so happens that they are from, in the first book, a fantastical version of an African country, and in the second, a fantastical version of a Caribbean country. There are still so many universal things that they can take from that. And what I’ve learned from my school visits is that kids don’t care. They don’t care that it’s a black kid on the cover. They don’t care that it’s set in Africa and that there are no white characters. They don’t mind about any of that. Adults have that societal barrier, and that also ripples into the wider industry, of course. I think in the last few years, following the Black Lives Matter movement, some really prominent books, like The Hate U Give, became really big over here. People began to look at themselves and look at their lists, and say, oh, we really don’t have anything like this, or any writers of colour really or, oh, we don’t really have any editors as well who are from that space and can then be authentic when they’re working with these writers. That had a big peak in 2020 especially, as a lot of industries had to do a lot of self-reflection. But now, in the children’s literature space, I’ve seen that there has been less risk-taking, and a lot of Black editors I know have either left the industry completely, or are taking a break, or been fired. That, compounded with the fact that we’ve been seeing less energy in terms of tackling this massive gap in representation, gives the feeling that we’re taking steps backwards, which makes it even more important to stay prominent, stay relevant.

My third book is more contemporary, but it’s again talking about things I want to challenge. It takes the idea of an international, relic-seeking adventurer, but it’s putting artifacts back, so it’s restitution. I’m sneaking that message in there by giving kids an adventure, because post-pandemic, literacy levels have dropped quite significantly, as has reading for pleasure.

HM: Now that we are in this climate where there is less risk-taking, there are much tighter lists, some lists where there isn’t even a writer of colour on there – is it easier or more difficult for you to be a writer now 5 years on from 2020, 10 years on since the founding of Jhalak? How has the end of this wave of publishers scrambling to diversify their lists changed your approach as a writer? Do you feel freer or more cautious? For me it’s easier in the sense that I don’t have to work out which publishers are being genuine in their efforts, but also, it’s difficult that the shutters are being pulled up when I’m trying to get a book out there.

JR: Over the past 20 or 30 years, the publishing industry has changed enormously in terms of its focus, and its openness. In the 90s in particular, there were a lot of mergers; we had over 25 very well established and very well-known publishers prior to that time, and now we only have four big publishers. The kinds of investments that we made in that industry became quite preeminent. Jeremy Poynting and I did an interview some time ago with the Bookseller where we talked about how the publishers that are publishing now, seem to invest not so much in writers and their careers, but in books. This largely explained the phenomenon of the debut novelist. A week doesn’t go by, or a month doesn’t go by, when you don’t see some big thing about this fantastic debut novelist. I have been doing some statistical analysis of how many of them remain in the limelight.

A classic example of the opposite of that is Bernardine Evaristo. Bernardine was writing for over 40 years, but her publisher, Simon Prosser, acquired her first book, called Lara. He was visionary, because what he was seeing was not a writer who can earn the company some money, but a writer with phenomenal potential. He stuck with her throughout her writing career, and she delivered the Booker Prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other. With today’s new approach, you’ll see less examples like this, unless you have a highly enlightened publisher who understands.

Another thing that I see that has shifted is that one’s public image and the extent to which one can have a presence on social media, has become a part of the marketing tool. I’m not trying to discredit anybody, everybody deserves a break, frankly, but the point is that even though you might have writers who are perfectly able to articulate the literature, it’s no longer about the integrity of the work but a lot of it is to do with the persona of the person.

It’s not just the publishing industry, I don’t want to get too hard on them, but I compare it to a spring door. Whenever something big, like George Floyd, happens, or whenever some event happens that shakes or disturbs the dominant narrative that society has of itself, they will open the door, so you think that it’s open permanently, but the door is a spring door – it closes back automatically. Now I’m seeing a new kind of novel that is interested in being quite sensational to make a whole heap of money. But at the end of the day, my great-great-great-grandchildren, when they look back, where is the possibility of understanding what life was like for their great-great-great-grandparents. What was society like? These things bother me. They are personal preoccupations that I have.

But something very important that Ashley said, is that in his writing, the emphasis is on story, which is what it’s all about. Regardless of the message you have lying underneath, people read it for the immersion in things happening to people, happening around people, the way your characters negotiate life, the way they get through challenges. That, for me, is at the heart of all of it, and that is universal. Nobody has a prerogative on that. I think that if you stick to that, which is what you’re doing, then you’re on the right path. The difficulty arises now when people, the ‘gatekeepers’ as we call them, bring their own social, cultural, and racial attitudes to your writing. Because then it’s no longer a story, it becomes a statement, it becomes racialised or culturalised if it’s a different culture. It’s more to do with, ‘does that add to my story, or my idea of myself, or the people I represent, their idea of themselves?’ That’s really what the problem is. The problem is never, never the writing. A good book is a good book, is a good book, regardless of who writes it or where it comes from. The problem has always been who decides on the relevance of this book for the readership. How many Black writers receive a note along the lines of, ‘think your book is brilliant, it’s well done, it’s wonderful, but we cannot find a market for this book’? In other words, ‘white readers aren’t going to like this book because it’s not speaking to them about themselves.’ It’s nonsense! That’s not what writing is about.

AT: I resonate so much with so many of Jacob’s points, but specifically of Bernadine, and her writing. In 2019 when Girl, Woman, Other came out and blew up, and the amount of books I then saw come out with this silhouette of a Black woman’s face with a head wrap, or a black woman’s head, was huge. They’re all trying to tap into that, and that is what publishing does. It will always try and follow a trend and to make some money off of it. But the thing that minorities don’t have is that we don’t always get to fail and come back from it if things don’t go in the way that we hope. So, we won’t get the leeway that certain other authors have been allowed, even if their books don’t necessarily sell a lot. And that leads really nicely into career longevity, which was the point that Jacob articulated so well.

Years and years before I came into the industry, it would have been a lot harder as a writer of colour in the first place to get in. But there definitely is something now to publishers putting a lot behind the debut, and then that energy just isn’t necessarily there if you haven’t sold a lot. And with your writing career, in years gone by, it might not have been the first book, it might have been, the 5th, the 7th, before the big break or the award winner. Not all writers now are going to have that luxury. I had a two-book deal, and this time last year, I’d gone into the new year having had a conversation with the head publicist at my publisher, and it was made clear that the sales weren’t as great for the first book as they’d hoped, and the second book was not going to have proofs, or have X and X and X thing. So, you’re getting the kind of message that the energy’s not really there, and that was sad for me because I felt like Spirit Warriors was in many ways, a better book than my first.

I know the quality of my stories (I’m not being, big-headed when I say this) but I feel when I’ve got something that I know kids are going to enjoy. I’m happy with it, because I’ve nailed exactly what I wanted it to be. But not everybody knows the industry like I know it, having worked in it too, and I will always be pushing whatever I can to make sure that I’m not forgotten, and to make sure that I’m in touch with a lot of independent bookshops as well. It’s the indies who have done major things for me, and those relationships have helped massively – as well as school visits and just trying to get myself out there. All of that has really helped me, but that’s not everybody’s journey. So, I’ve had this one book deal for another middle grade, but I’m also now about to progress with my first young adult book and it kind of feels like I’m starting again because we don’t have a deal. I’m writing it in this current climate, and hopefully, the writing speaks for itself, but you just don’t know, right?

So it hasn’t necessarily changed the way that I’m writing, but I’m currently writing a fantasy with romance elements. It will most likely be pushed to the romantasy market, even though the romance isn’t a focal point of the story. That was the story I chose to write out of all the ideas I had – one, because the energy was there, but also because it did seem like it was the most likely to hopefully take off and make a sale to survive again. So, there’s that as well.

HM: Thinking about Jacob’s point around writing as an archival act, and Bernardine’s career being this example of having that luxury of time, and contrasting that with what you’re saying, where the focus now is on the debut. I wondered – what do you want to sustain, to carry into the future, when the visibility is gone? When maybe the book is out of print, and it is existing just in a library or on a personal bookshelf? Also, what luxuries do you feel you have now as a writer? Like, maybe it’s how has your relationship to time changed, i.e. the time to draft something, to fail, to change direction, as you are, Ashley, now, into YA?

AT: If we think about the British canon of children’s fiction and that fantasy space especially – you’ll always have, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Philip Pullman. There’s definitely something about all these writers as well, right? Something we all know. They were all white men. I think Katherine Rundell will probably join them now as well, with Impossible Creatures and such, but there is something about all these British works where there’s a similar thread running through them. And there are no writers of colour on that that canon, and I hope eventually I’ll be able to write a book that resonates hard enough that it will be on that, and that’s something that people go back to, regardless of ethnicity, something that people will say ‘That is a story that should be in classrooms and reading lists.’ That would be the dream, that you’ve had something you’ve written that is able to make that indelible mark. That’s the first thing for me, I think.

The other thing with publishing is that some people are lucky to have an editor who’s with them for most of their career. But now editors change jobs a lot, and I’m lucky that I’ve had the same editor for my two, three books now, and I know it’s somebody who understands me and my work. From our very first call, I got the sense that we would work together really well, because I was asking what she initially thought might change [with the story], to get a sense of whether she felt the same as I did about it. Thankfully it’s worked out so well, and with an indie publisher, I feel like I’ve got maybe a bit more freedom to take some risks, and even for them to take some risks on the kind of things I’m writing.

In terms of time, now that I’m full-time writing, I do have quite a bit more, so I’m trying to make the absolute most of it now. Being in my late 30s, I feel like there’s a lot of time to make up for.

JR: You’re a very young man, you know, this age thing that you’re trying to sell me, I’m not convinced. You’re young, you’re young… not even relative to me, you’re just young. And you have a lot of time ahead, so you use that time, you invest in that time, and you’re trying to kind of negotiate your way out of this. Another thing I wanted to say to you, Ashley, that’s based on my experience, and probably it’s part of your experience too, but the reliance, doesn’t only have to be on a British readership if you have good publishers, and I suspect you do have agents who can sell the rights to your book.

There’s a thing also in terms of emerging markets. The West Africans are doing some really interesting things with Afrofuturism, which is not necessarily all that divergent from what you are doing, and there’s a market there. And you are necessary, I think, as a writer. I’ll get your books, and I’ll just start shouting – certainly to all of my colleagues. I have two young grandkids, they’re going to read your book, I can guarantee that, so you’ve got sales already.

AT: It’s interesting, I kind of thought that my books would sell easier in the US than they have over here, actually. And neither of them sold in the US at all.

JR: The US has a problem with book banning, and things like this will probably make things harder for us. But that’s not why you write. You write because you have something to say, and because you must.  It will change again, it will come around, and we would be stronger, and I suspect we’ll be more aware of the kinds of the obstacles that we have to negotiate. We won’t stop, because they’re not going to win this argument, trust me.

I like England a lot, you know, and I like British people, and I’m not saying this trivially. I love the country, and the people, I find, are better than the governments. All we need to do is to continue doing what we’re doing. Rewriting the stories, filling in the silences, filling in the history that has been ignored. And we’ll have resistance, because nations define themselves by their own national narrative, their history. Britain has, for a very long time, been “civilising” nations around the world, and then there are a whole heap of people now who are coming up and saying, ‘hang on a minute, it wasn’t exactly like that, you exterminated this population’. And it’s uncomfortable, because what we’re doing is shifting a whole nation’s perception of itself. It’s a big one; that’s the kind of difficulty that we throw at them. It’s hard to absorb that – imagine growing up and becoming an adult, and you discover that the person who you always grew up to think was your father isn’t your father, or your mother isn’t your mother. It’s a real psychological shock. So, they fight it. That’s what it’s all about.

HM: I want to thank you both for such a far-reaching, and engaging conversation. I want to open up the space for you to ask each other something or discuss something that hasn’t come up yet in this conversation. Jacob, you’ve already kind of led on this by speaking directly to Ashley.

AT: Yeah, I think for me – and we kind of touching on this just now – inverse I guess, dark periods where it seems like you’re fighting against the Zeitgeist. How do you maintain your motivation and not feel like, ‘what’s the point in this?’

JR: I think the self-belief is believing in the necessity and the importance of what you’re doing. I’ll give you a good example. I’ve always had some very serious enemies in the Caribbean, and that’s because I gave a lot of primacy to women in my writing. Women are the dominant forces, and they are the agents of change. Not because the goal is to be feminist, but because in studying Caribbean history, I learned very deeply and very quickly (although it took me years to really absorb) that women are the backbone of Caribbean society. So, women have a lot of agency on my pages, but there are men who genuinely feel threatened by it. But what’s interesting is that over the past couple of years, that resistance began to fall away. And people are now much more ready to engage in the debates and the conversations, and to examine themselves.

But can you imagine a future where new generations of your family pick up your book and sit down to read it, and they think wow this is how my great-great-great-uncle thought… in other words, your mind is alive with them. In other words, you’re not dead. You are alive on your page. Even at that very personalised familial level, you have left something of yourself behind.

AT: I think the centring of women in stories has been a very conscious thing for me in this era, because we haven’t tackled anywhere near enough of this societally ingrained misogyny that particularly young boys have. I feel like secondary school is too late to be tackling some of these issues. Even though the first book is called The Boy to Beat the Gods, structurally, women are there as key allies. Then with the second book my publisher did ask at the time whether I could make the protagonist a boy, and there were specific reasons why I didn’t want that to happen. You have to challenge these things by increments and just show them a different way. It’s so important especially because society is already telling boys that they are the main character.

JR: Yes, and it’s not as if young boys have never met defiant female characters. In a way we’re not doing anything new, we’re utilizing a feature of our lives in narratives.

The post I Wish there Had Been Writers Like You Writing about Characters with Which My Children Could Have Identified appeared first on English PEN.

Thank you to English PEN for having me here, and for the depth of their work over the many years they’ve been fighting tirelessly for the rights, freedoms and lives of writers.

Also shout out to the late Harold Pinter, for being the inspiration behind this prize and for helping reveal, to me who began my career as a playwright, and to many others across the many worlds of literature, that to write with urgency and purpose in pursuit of exploring the real truth of our lives, can bring unparalleled joy, impact, daring and sometimes, sadly, danger. But of course, the biggest thank you tonight is to Leila Aboulela, for whom we are all here this evening, and whose name has been synonymous in my mind with joy, impact, daring and danger, in the best ways, since the very first book I read of hers.

This book was her 2010 novel, Lyrics Alley, a love story backgrounded by the 1950s time of Sudanese independence from British colonialism. Each character in the epic expanse of the book having a varying relationship to Islam and their own perspectives on everything from polygamy to poetry. I knew then that her work was an absolute balm to sensationalism, as she delved deftly into the details of internal lives that led to individual choices which can’t be quickly explained away by taking one side or another.

When I read Lyrics Alley, I was pregnant, broke, and unable to see how I would continue as a writer while caring for a tiny human indifferent to my deadlines. Though it could not restore lost sleep or alter the unrealistic demands placed on creative work for meagre compensation, its political backdrop bursting with revolution, its inherent poetry inextricable with spiritual meaning and its cast of problematic family members who didn’t always redeem themselves, offered something invaluable: hope and perspective. It gave me faith.

Faith, though often unfashionable in the arts, emerges in Aboulela’s work not as an oppressor, but as a source of solace – a well of deep knowing. It is from this well that logic can be drawn to guide her character’s hardest decisions, rather than serving only as a tool for irrational or violent acts, as faith has so often been used in contemporary literature. For Aboulela, faith and storytelling are inseparable, evident not only in her characters but also in her use of spiritual journeys as structures, such as the Sufi Seven Valleys pilgrimage-inspired journey in her novel, Bird Summons. As Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, ethno-nationalism, and the co-opting of Christianity for fascist ends threatens our present and future, it is vital to read works like hers and remember that the pursuit of a spiritual life need not serve any agenda but our own yearning for meaning.

And everyone, of faith or not, is currently searching for meaning in this in between time we find ourselves living through. A time of transition and transformation, that seems to be marching forwards and running backwards with equal force. Transformation is at the heart of Aboulela’s characters. They dwell in the in-between, perpetually in process, never complete, and finding something resembling wholeness only through acceptance of this perpetual state, experienced through the body and through place.

Walking on unfamiliar ground in strange countries and new cities, Aboulela’s characters’ feet touch the earth and it is theirs, even if they are unsure of it. Whether through the plains of Russia, the heaths of Scotland or the alleys of Khartoum that they walk through in her Caine Prize-winning novel The Kindness of Enemies, or on the shores and in the living rooms of Algiers, where her characters renegotiate their steps with one another in her subversive play The Insider, Aboulela reminds us that no matter where we find ourselves, we are all simultaneously visitors and locals, with the same earth beneath our feet, from Gaza to Glasgow.

In these tumultuous times, such acceptance and awareness is essential for survival. Stability, assurance, and solidity now feel oddly nostalgic. Perhaps they were always illusions. Either way, they are now certainly shattered even for those who had the luxury to believe in them. Yet, as Aboulela’s characters show us, we can thrive in the unfixed, in the in-between. This is where work is done, where transformation occurs, where it can be easier than ever to find the people who know the future can be reshaped whilst it is in flux. And where those who greet uncertainty with curiosity and openness, rather than anger and violence towards the most vulnerable, will guide us to a better place.

For now, that better place may exist only in literature and imagination. A world where genocide, the systematic slaughter of human beings of all ages, talents and types, is neither used, endorsed, nor enabled for any reason, least of all for land and resource deals benefitting those already overflowing with wealth. A future where ‘tomorrow’ means more than short-term profit margins; a time when our descendants can enjoy their fleeting presence on earth without suffocation or fear of being swept away by wind, water or bombs. A place where states are not mere banks for corporations to withdraw public money from, but act genuinely for the public good, refusing to gaslight those who have contributed most, or persecute those who have the least.

Until then, Leila Aboulela’s literature lets us hold onto the possibility of transformation, the solace of faith, and the power of storytelling to imagine a future which we can shape, if we take a step.

Thank you Leila, for all the steps you’ve already taken.

The post Between Worlds: Sabrina Mahfouz’s Encomium for Leila Aboulela appeared first on English PEN.

I think it was because, when I was a child, I loved reading but always had a feeling that writers didn’t represent children as they really were. There were no real emotional worries: children were rounding up robbers in Enid Blyton; in school stories, girls were sometimes picked on, but the depiction just didn’t chime with me, even as I enjoyed reading the books. I liked Noel Streatfeild – my favourite book of hers was Ballet Shoes – and the sisters did quarrel, but it just wasn’t any kind of reflection on life. And I don’t just mean my sort of life because I was brought up in a council estate, but many people’s actual private lives. In fact, there’s a moment in one of my childhood diaries where I write in rather ponderous terms that I don’t want to write children’s books when I grow up, because they’re not truthful about children.

I actually really did want to write for children. And I was lucky that, by the time I started writing, things had shifted a little – there was suddenly room for stories like Tracy Beaker and children in care, or Andy in The Suitcase Kid, whose parents are splitting up. Very sadly, there seem to be more children in care now. And certainly many, many more children whose parents aren’t together anymore. Life has changed.

I don’t want to traumatise children, but I do want to be truthful. I want them to be comforted, and I want to have happy endings, and I want to have lots of funny bits to break any tension. I want any child going through a horrible time to feel that there’s somebody out there for them, that they’re not alone, that somebody understands what they’re going through. And, if a child is lucky enough to have a very secure family and lots of friends, for them to be able to empathise with other children who might seem a bit withdrawn or weird or angry.

It does give me great delight when, now, as I sign copies of Think Again,my book for adults, people have said quietly to me that my books had helped them and made a difference to their lives. Who wouldn’t feel pleased and touched that that’s happened?

Empathy really is so central to your books. You write with such compassion and sensitivity about your characters, and I know this has helped young readers to develop empathy towards others, and to cope with issues in their own lives that require the empathy of others.

Empathy is so often coded as a female trait, and so many of your readers are girls – though you of course have readers of all genders. I’m interested in your thoughts on this – on what constitutes empathy, and on its value in literature where empathy can be such a gendered notion?

I know it’s not fashionable to see differences between males and females, but in my experience, if you look at the primary school playground, girls are often going around arm in arm or whispering together, or suddenly turning against another girl, while boys fight or have a fierce argument and then it’s all over and done with, and is kind of more straightforward. I think girls often understand instinctively how somebody else might be feeling – but this is so generalised, because there are obviously many boys who do, and many girls who just want to go out and play football. I do feel that empathy often comes more naturally to women, perhaps because women have traditionally had to raise the children, and to try and think what another person is thinking, what it must be like for that person. That’s where I welcome the fact that so many youngish fathers are very much more in the picture now, wanting to empathise and help out and spend time with their young children.

I think most women would say that they’re almost fine-tuned into sensing when a child of theirs comes home and they’re a little withdrawn – they just know that something’s happened, that something’s gone wrong. But all I can really write about are my own experiences, and that’s the way it seems to me.

What do you think the responsibilities of children’s authors are, especially today, when, for example, online misogyny is on the rise, and children can so easily access this content through social media and the internet?

It’s a huge problem. It’s very difficult. I really don’t know how we get around it, because most children are wily about getting round any blocks on their phones and accessing the most horrible things. Although they’ve got all this knowledge, they’re also in a way more innocent too – they can think that because you see some horrible thing on the internet it must be true that women like to be hurt and humiliated in a sexual relationship. This is what’s so frightening.

There are very good male adult role models, of course. But there’s this sinister new movement about what it is to be a man, and you’ve got all these young boys who naturally want to get on with others and do what is considered right. But what is right, now? I do feel sorry for them. I just think it’s very hard to deal with.

Going back to what you said about writing in a truthful way, because your books deal with difficult topics in such honest and open ways, there’s often conversation around your books being ‘controversial’ or even ‘inappropriate’ for children. What’s your response when people (parents, for example) say they don’t allow children to read your books?

It’s their prerogative. If they don’t want children to read my books, that’s fine. I was in my local bookshop and there was a mum with her daughter and several other girls the daughter’s age, and they were looking at the children’s section. The bookseller is very loyal to me, and has a whole load of my books on that shelf, and one of the little girls said, ‘Oh, oh, Jacqueline Wilson, oh, can I have this one Mummy?’ and she said, ‘Certainly not!’ I fell about laughing in the background. It was very embarrassing.

I think adults often want to keep their children feeling that the world is safe and cozy – and why wouldn’t you? But I don’t think I’ve ever had a letter from a child or young adult saying they couldn’t bear a book. Once or twice, children have said a book made them cry, and I’ve said ‘I’m so sorry,’ but then one of them said, ‘But I like crying!’ It’s a tightrope, because I want to be truthful but I still want to be entertaining. I certainly don’t want my books to be banned.

Maybe adults going through a troubled time might, in retrospect, think that one of my books was too upsetting. But mostly I have had lovely positive reactions. There was a trend going round on social media , ‘Jacqueline Wilson traumatised me.’ But I think that was very tongue in cheek. Then there was a sort of counter-movement of ‘Jacqueline Wilson raised me.’ When Think Again came out and, in the initial weeks, there were t-shirts and tote bags with ‘Jacqueline Wilson raised me’ on them. I made my daughter put one on and photographed her, because she’s the only person who could legitimately say that!

I think that if anyone were to take the trouble to write to me and tell me exactly why they thought a certain book wasn’t suitable, I would read it very carefully and take it seriously. But I’ve never thought This was a huge mistake. It is difficult with books that I wrote, say, 30 years ago, because times have changed enormously. We’ve become much more sensitive about certain issues.

How much do you worry about book banning in general (which is of course a much bigger issue in America, where many children’s books are being banned from libraries and schools, often those which explore similar issues to those about which you write – like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume)? Do you fear this will only get worse?

I have very few books published in America – they have been banned, I think. It’s a problem. But I do think that, here, publishers do struggle so much. Books are much more carefully edited, copy edited, sent to different specialist organisations to make sure that no offense can be taken. I understand all of this. With me, if something has been pointed out to me that could possibly cause offence, I always think very carefully. Mostly, I accept suggestions or edit myself very carefully. Sometimes, as an old lady, I think really? And just occasionally I will say something has to stay the way it is, because it wouldn’t work in any other way. It is a difficult thing.

Do you think the reception of your books would have differed at all if they were primarily aimed at boys, and centred primarily around male characters?

It’s hard to know. Melvin Burgess wrote a book, Junk, about three teenage boys, which delves into their minds, and it was probably a very truthful book, but I’m pretty certain that it would not be on any shelves now – not at all for any sort of issue of literary quality, but because I think people would prefer not to think about what it’s like in a teenage boy’s mind.

If you look at the top ten children’s books, I would say the majority of them have male characters – from Harry Potter to Wimpy Kid and Tom Gates. Books for children also seem to have changed a bit: they are much shorter and much more heavily illustrated; they deal with issues, but in a comic sort of way. Part of the problem is that any book now comes second to looking at a phone. If I was a bookseller or children’s librarian, I would recommend Impossible Creatures by the wonderful Katherine Rundell, because I think she’s a brilliant writer, and because it’s both quite easy to read and deals with such interesting things, for boys as well as for girls.

I’d also like to ask about the relationship you have with your readers. Writer–reader solidarity is something that PEN has been supporting for over a hundred years, and it feels like your bond with your readers is particularly special.

When I was growing up, I adored you and all of your books. I even had a Jacqueline Wilson branded diary that I wrote in, which made it feel a bit like I was sharing my thoughts with you and your characters. I was lucky enough to meet you a few times at book signings, and each time I gave you a letter that I had written, and you always wrote back to me. Your replies are some of my most treasured possessions. What has it meant to you to receive letters from your fans and what does that exchange with your readers mean to you? How valuable is letter-writing today?

It’s so wonderful. I’ve got boxes and boxes of letters children have written to me up in the attic. Initially, I replied to all of them. But it became difficult because I was spending far more time writing letters than actually writing books. Now I can’t promise that I can write back to everybody, but for anybody who writes a really interesting, sincere letter, or who is going through a particularly hard time, I do try and do my best.

I was in John Lewis in Oxford Street recently, doing a signing in the new Waterstones bookshop in the store, and there were four people in the queue who had kept their childhood postcards from me. I’m amazed at the number of people who have kept them. It’s just so lovely to feel that people cared enough to put pen to paper (or crayon to paper!).

There are people I’ve written to almost as if they were nieces. These are very special to me. There’s a young woman in Ireland who wrote to me when she was very ill, when she was about twelve, and we are still communicating. And there’s another young woman I write to who lives outside Glasgow. I recently met up with her, which was lovely.

There’s a young man who I first wrote to when he was about seven. Now he’s 24 and has recently moved to London, and I think he is coming to visit soon – which will be a bit strange for both of us. But it’s lovely to feel that people have really liked my books. I’ve been sent so many photographs over the years of girls’ bedrooms with all my books, and it’s just so sweet.

That’s so heartwarming to hear. Finally, I wanted to ask about your experience of writing for adults in Think Again, compared to writing for children. What was it like revisiting your old teenage characters, now in their adult lives, and your younger readers, now grown into their own adult lives?

It’s surreal. It really is. Often at book signings it’s the mother who’s keener to have a photo than the child. I’ve got this sort of double kind of audience, which is so special.

It’s been in my mind for a long time to write about a few of the characters I wrote about in the past. I had a conversation with my daughter, in which we were playing about a bit and trying to think what might have happened to some of the characters. Other people have done that online, and there seemed to be some interest. Then, wonderfully, someone approached my agent and asked if I’d be interested, and I said ‘Yes please!’ The Girls series was one of the most popular, so I thought Let’s have a go.

You’re opening yourself up for criticism a bit, because everybody has expectations about what might have happened. I’ve had suggestions that are so remarkably funny and lurid and certainly not publishable.

When I was writing about teenage girls, I was endlessly going into schools, and often having to face Year Nine (who can be a bit scary at times). With the permission of the teachers, I could talk to the girls during break time, and ask them what was worrying them the most, who had a boyfriend, whether they were allowed to go out by themselves in little bunches? In Think Again, Ellie is 40; I am obviously way, way, way past 40. I do have some friends who are 40, but you can’t really ask them any really intimate questions, you would feel shy and peculiar and nosy, unless they’re your best friends. So I had to think quite hard about what it would be like for Ellie to be 40. I did have some diaries that I kept when I was that age, but I find it very cringey going back to my diaries, so I tried not to do that. Then, wonderfully, as soon as I started writing, somehow Ellie just came to me.

I found it much easier than I thought it would be. And I loved writing it, I really, really did. I always like writing, but it was something new. I wondered what it would be like going out to promote it, but I’ve never had such a lovely book tour. People were so kind and so appreciative, which is just the sort of boost you need when you think, Oh, I’m getting old; am I getting past it? 

A lot of older friends and family have said, ‘Why are you carrying on writing? You’ve made enough money to see you and your partner through and to leave to your daughter; you’ve got a lovely house, and you’ve got lovely books, everything that you would want; why keep on writing, because it must tire you out writing a lot at home and then going out and promoting it?’ One particular friend said to me, very genuinely, ‘I think you should take up doing jigsaws.’ I thought You have no idea what pleasure (and also what anxiety) writing gives me – and it’s not going to happen with jigsaws! I think I just am a writer, and I have to carry on writing while words make sense.

The post I Don’t Want to Traumatise Children, but I Do Want to Be Truthful: A Conversation with Jacqueline Wilson appeared first on English PEN.

All Will Know

Strolling down the souq in al-Nuseirat, witnessing the destruction of homes and markets, I bump into our building’s guard. We engage in chitchat about the ongoing atrocities. He shares the heart-wrenching news that my home and my brother’s have been bombarded. I say, ‘No problem. Money will come again. What really matters is souls.’Material harm, rather than a dear one, as the Palestinian proverb goes in such times of destruction. ‘How are you and yours?’ I ask.

‘I’m still alive, and my wife and children are still with me,’ he says. ‘But the rest of my family has been martyred. My siblings and uncles are all gone. Our building was bombed. They exterminated us.’ His eyes are red.

I console him, ashamed. I share that my niece’s son, along with my cousins’ children, are all martyrs, and that the fate of my niece’s second son – he was kidnapped by the occupying forces – is unclear.

He consoles me, pats my hand, and so I do the same, turning martyrs over in our fingers.

‘Where are you staying now?’ he asks.

‘Here in az-Zawayda. Near the historical site. You?’

‘I took shelter in a storehouse. The people there welcomed me in – may Allah compensate them.’ His voice wobbles.

‘How do you buy what you need?’

My question seems to strike him. ‘I sold my phone for 500 shekels,’ he says. ‘And I’m spending them.’  I see the overburdened pride in him. ‘I need to feed my kids. I sold my phone – so what? Why should I keep it? Who would I call? My family’s all gone. I don’t want any more news. And if I became a martyr, everyone would know anyway.’

Muhie/Mukhie

Today, Muhie is sick. A ten-person family was displaced along with us and Muhie is their three-year-old son. He’s in the very first stages of soaking up Arabic, pronouncing ‘ha’ as ‘kha’, ‘sa’ as ‘tha’. Arabic weeps when he speaks. We call him Mukhie the Israeli because the way he pronounces Arabic is like a settler learning it for the first time. Ironically, Mukhie is fair skinned with blue eyes and blond hair. If Israeli soldiers saw him or heard him, they’d think him a hostage.

Normally, Mukhie wakes up, greeting everyone with a cheerful ‘Mornin awl’, and then moves towards me, gives me a ‘Mornin’ too, and asks if there is water, and Arabic weeps.

‘Morning, Mukhie!’ I say, smiling. ‘All the water is for you.’

He has become the soul of the camp. He helps us chop and collect the logs. He plays with the children of the village, acts as their leader. Everyone surrounds him. But at the same time they somehow steer clear.

Muhie’s father is frightened for his children. He tries to shield their eyes from the panic and the fear. ‘When you see a tank, I’ll let you drive it,’ he had once promised Muhie. And then Muhie had admonished his father: ‘We saw tanks and soldiers but you didn’t let me drive. You said “Not now”. I don’t like people lying to me’.

Except it didn’t sound like this. Every word was mispronounced. Arabic wept. If I wrote it how he said it, you wouldn’t understand. But this is Muhie, and this is how he speaks. And the sixty of us on the farm have learned and adopted it.

I ask Muhie’s father about his promise. ‘I don’t want him to be traumatised by the tanks and soldiers,’ he says. ‘So I told him, “I’ll let you drive it unless you give me trouble,” so that he’ll think of the tank as nothing more than a car. Only when he grows up will he understand that it’s the car of the dead.’

But as I say, today, Muhie is sick, grappling with a stomach bug because of contaminated water. He coughs as if a tank is marching over his chest. His lungs are inflamed from the dust of the ongoing shelling. This is a child who thinks life is just a toy: he holds it, turns it over, loosens and tightens its screws, pulls at its rope, all so that he can understand its structure. The crucial point remains: death isn’t a core part of his life.

The Tale of Two Cancers

‘A cup of coffee and some water, please. After that, I’ll tell you everything.’ He is Abou Ali, a 55-year-old man. He is new to the farm. He lost his wife and their only child after the occupation forces bombarded the house that had sheltered them for 40 days. They had been martyred shortly after he was displaced.

Abou Ali had refused to leave Gaza. He had promised not to repeat his father’s mistake, not to carry the stories of a third and a fourth migration on his back. So he had decided to stay in Gaza, to witness the occupation’s violence. We don’t like to hear about it, but we must, because collective memory is built on shared scenes, the accumulated narratives of the farmer and the land.

‘As I prepare to go to bed,’ Abou Ali says, ‘I pray three prayers: the Isha Prayer, the Absentee Funeral Prayer for the martyrs, and the Night Vigil Prayer. Then I lie on my bed, and before sleep creeps over my eyelids I place my ID in my shirt pocket and a piece of paper with my full name in my trouser pocket. Just in case. If my house is bombed with me inside, and I’m torn to pieces, my name might then be found in my hand or foot. That one night, as death surrounded us, I took my pen and wrote my name on my hands, my feet, my chest. I felt like a narcissist.’

That night, Abou Ali’s house was bombed. When the window fell onto him, thick pieces of concrete came with it and formed a pyramid over his body. And when the ceiling fell, that pyramid shielded him. ‘I don’t know how I survived. What I did know was that I could no longer stay at home. I headed to al-Rantisi Hospital, where they care for children with cancer. It’s become a refuge for children and families escaping two cancers: disease and occupation.’

He continues. ‘When they controlled the area around al-Karama Street, and they set out from the  roundabout that separates al-Karama Street from al-Nasr Street, and the quadcopters fired on every passer-by – that night, I don’t know how I fell asleep. When I woke, it wasn’t to Fairouz’s voice, but the tank’s muzzle hailing me at the window under which I slept. And at that moment, I realised that cancer had spread through the body of the city.’

He continues. ‘They ordered us to hold our IDs in our right hands and raise white flags in our left and exit the hospital one by one. They then directed us to walk in a straight line from al-Nasr toward al-Galaa Street until we reached the checkpoint on Salah al-Din Street, where we could pass to a safe area. I didn’t comply. I veered off from al-Galaa Street toward al-Rimal to reach Shifa Hospital. As I was walking, I saw corpses thrown to the ground – men, women, children, teens. Some had been hit by sniper fire, more than once. Some had been shelled, more than once.’

He continues. ‘Here is a hand and a head. There a foot and a toe. This is a shoulder. I didn’t know who had leaned against it. But it was lying in a long street today, no one to carry it. This street was a tomb with neither tombstones nor sand. Just corpses. Even the undertaker’s corpse was lying on that street.’ He continues.

The Story Isn’t a Story, Nor the Hero a Hero

I understand. I understand that we have grown accustomed to stories with happy endings, or at the very least with a hero. Even stories with sad endings have heroes. But here? Nothingness. The story isn’t a story. The hero is not a hero. Nor is Gaza that Gaza that I know, the Gaza I used to tell others about.

Once, in Ramallah, a friend had asked me, ‘Ahmad, tell me about Gaza. What colours is it? How does it smell?’

‘Gaza is shelter for me and all Gazans,’ I had said. ‘The sea is ours; the streets are for us. When I walk in Gaza, I put my hands in my pockets. I know the streets. I never fear getting lost. I never expect an attack from a stranger. I stroll through Gaza in peace, as though I were in my own bedroom. I have wandered the streets of Cairo, Amman, Istanbul, Doha and Ramallah with my hands in the air and nothing in my pockets except for my phone. My hands were ready for strangers. In all my life, in all my places, I have never felt secure anywhere except in Gaza.’

Today, a year and a half after that answer, I now say, ‘You might read, Ghadeer, that all the world is safer than Gaza. Today, my hands are in the air, crossed like Christ. Today, my pocket is a graveyard. When I put my hand into it, my fingers embrace a martyr. Today, the stranger is here. The attack is a silent cancer. Today, I’m fed up with counting genocide days, and the tomb is full.’ shoulder their boats: poets reciting their poetry standing up, writers ached and hunching over their desks, the many named and nameless who carry the suffering of the world on their shoulders to the shores of the sea.

The post When I Walk in Gaza, I Put My Hands in My Pockets appeared first on English PEN.

Chloe – thank you so much for speaking with me. I wanted to start by asking about your writing practice. You’ve been writing for almost half your life. What first ignited your craft? And what tools have helped you sustain it?

Thank you for having me – I’m so happy to be here chatting. I started writing because I was a big reader. I was a huge fan of the franchises that were erupting in the 2010s during the dystopian and paranormal romance era. When I ran out of books to read from my borrowed library stack every week, I essentially had ran out of hobbies. My whole teenage life revolved around books; if I wasn’t reading, I was thinking about reading, or probably talking about it on Tumblr. What I loved most was the escapism. To fill the void once I had finished my library books, I turned to writing my own. As the years went on – and I picked up more hobbies and interests – escapism evolved into a love for storytelling. It felt wonderful to create a whole world that would feel real to a reader – as real as my favorite books felt to me. I have to remember that I’m creating something out of nothing, and it shouldn’t be like sitting down to write a to-do list – reframing the work as “not work” is a tool that helps keep the creativity running.

Your books take inspiration from Shakespeare, but as someone who has raised reading YA fantasy, I can see the influence of the likes of Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments series on your books too. What made you gravitate towards blending Shakespeare and YA? And how has reimagining work like Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It changed how you see the originals?

When I first began reading, books like The Mortal Instruments, Divergent, Daughter of Smoke and Bone, The Raven Cycle and so on were huge influences for my love of storytelling. I was 14 – these were the books that were made for me! This was also the background I’d come from when I started writing These Violent Delights several years later; though I’d started reading adult fiction, non-fiction, classics, I was still most familiar with YA, and so that’s what I wanted to write. I do sometimes wonder how much of Jace Herondale’s sardonic influence bleeds into every love interest I’ll ever write.

The Shakespearean angle was something I stumbled into. The original pitch for These Violent Delights had been: ‘Two rival gangs in a blood feud are forced to put aside the bloodshed when a monster rises and starts killing all their people’. And since there would be some sort of romantic storyline between the two enemy children, there was no way someone would hear that and not think ‘Oh, Romeo and Juliet’. I chose to embrace the similarities and offer a new lens on the story. I kept running with it, adapting As You Like It for Foul Lady Fortune. It’s given me a new appreciation for the originals, because I needed to decide what I thought the backbone of the play was; what it was specifically for me. Only then could I faithfully hold the heart of it and change out what I didn’t need.

You have written two relatively standalone series that exist in the same Secret Shanghai universe. Your worldbuilding is consummate, while also critiquing established ideas about fantasy and interrogating the genre’s colonial baggage. With all this in mind, how did writing within an existing universe free or hinder your writing?

Initially, there was a lot of pressure in writing a spin-off, because it had to be both similar enough to justify being set in the same world, and different enough to warrant being a new series rather than a continuation. My approach was to write These Violent Delights and Foul Lady Fortune in two different genres; though they share some of the same cast, These Violent Delights is historical fantasy while Foul Lady Fortune is more of a noir spy thriller. Between the 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai underwent enormous change, and the feeling I was trying to evoke when portraying the two decades is different. Historical fantasy, with a monster rising from the river, was most fitting for These Violent Delights as it grappled with colonialism in the late 1920s and with the elite’s own role in the destruction of their sense of identity. By the 1930s, we were less concerned with the West and more with impending Japanese imperialism, as well as domestic politics as Shanghai tried to put one unified fighting force forward. As a result, Foul Lady Fortune was full of double-spies and triple-spies, of ‘superpowers’, and of questions of responsibility to your government. I tried not to think of the existing universe as a limit, but more as a framework I could play with depending on what the new series needed.

I’d like to talk a little about BookTok, and the resurgence in fantasy readerships. How do you balance the pressure to write for your audiences with your own artistic priorities?

I try to separate things – to think about audience expectations as something to keep in mind for engagement, and artistic priorities as what dictates the writing process. Of course, there’s bleed over: if I’m thinking about a character’s decisions, I’m also thinking about everything I have read within the genre and what felt satisfying to me as a reader, and I gravitate toward choices that have expected payoffs. It’s nice to lean into elements that readers are passionate about, taking advantage of the romantic tropes that are present, or leading toward plot twists that are guaranteed shockers. But these must exist for the sake of the story before they’re looked at with an eye for marketing, or else the story loses its heart. I’ll never insert anything just for the sake of an audience expectation, but I can make use of what already works for the book I’m trying to write.

What’s next for you?

I’m currently working on my next YA, a cyberpunk trilogy opener called Coldwire. I am forbidden from saying too much until we have an official summary, but it is set in a near future world where life has moved to virtual reality. It has corporate soldiers waking up to the system, mega-corporations trying to take over the world, anarchists and hackers, etc. It’s everything I loved during the dystopian era, but written for a new tech-driven generation. And I’m so excited about it!

The post To Fill the Void: A Conversation with Chloe Gong appeared first on English PEN.

LILIANA COROBCA: Before this novel, I wrote another – A Year in Paradise – in which Sonia, the main character, has not yet turned 17. She has failed university admission and ends up in the clutches of a trafficker who takes her to a brothel in a war zone on the edge of the world. It explored an aspect of migration in the post-Soviet space, perhaps the most cruel and unfair aspect: human trafficking. In Kinderland, the girl is younger, and it was easy for me to adopt her voice. In fact, the novel was initially an epistolary one, in which the mother’s voice was as strong as the children’s. The kids told their mother what was happening at home and the mother told them what she was doing in Italy. But, as I wrote, the mother drifted away, until I couldn’t feel her anymore. I didn’t feel the need to step into her skin. She became an episodic character; when she appears, it’s through the eyes and voices of the children.

I was hesitant when I started writing the book (it was published in Romanian 10 years ago), because I felt I couldn’t write about children if I didn’t have them around, couldn’t see them by my side, observe their reactions, understand them by always watching them. Then I said to myself: let’s take a risk. For the elder children, Cristina and Dan, I used my relationship with my brother – who is seven years younger than me, the same age gap as in the book; the third child, who moved me when he appeared between the lines, was my imaginary one, my fictional little boy.

MONICA CURE: When I began reading Kinderland, Cristina’s voice immediately seemed familiar to me. A similar situation exists in Romania as in Moldova – especially among children in rural areas. Even when parents don’t leave the country to find work, they often have long commutes to the city, and so children spend much of their time in the company of grandparents or other children. I’ve spoken with children who have even picked up certain mannerisms or ways of speaking from elderly people. Having so much freedom – if that’s what we want to call it – makes these children seem to be ‘in the know’ about what is happening around them. But it’s also because they have to be.

WF: One of Kinderland’s great virtues is its modulation between severity and play (and in finding the playful in the severe, the severe in the playful). Liliana – could you talk a little about that modulation? And Monica – could you talk about severity and play in your act of translation?

MC: I think that’s a great observation. For me, the scene that best embodies this is when the youngest brother, Marcel, uses his father’s coat to pretend he’s there – even if not in a positive way. The siblings have played dress up in their parents’ clothes before, but this time it’s more poignant. We as readers experience that modulation intensely, but the narrator seems to experience most of it in the same way. That heightens the contrast. In my translation, I wanted to convey that overall consistency of the narrator’s tone.

LC: To be alone and abandoned in a village is a tragedy. But I tried to accept the children’s perspective: on the one hand, I think that any victim tries to tame reality, to adapt by looking for solutions; on the other, children are always playing – they grow up playing. The tone of the book is a very pure, very innocent one. I remember that I had just finished some projects on censorship – hard and dry – the year I was writing it, and I was seeking to balance my concerns; as dark and hopeless as the anthology of documents on communist censorship was, the story of the abandoned children was bright and tender. I felt that I had to invent some sunny events, so that I could continue the sad story and so that the reader could move forward, too. I wasn’t a detached, cold author: I got involved and looked for a balance and a solution. We can’t survive without a bit of humour, especially in contexts like the novel’s, a borderline situation to which thousands of people – children – are subject today.

WF: Monica – when your translation of Liliana’s The Censor’s Notebook won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, much was made of it being your debut. Your second book-length translation is of Liliana’s words, too. I’d like to ask about your translatorial voice, and how you think, at the moment, it relates to Liliana’s authorial voice.

MC: I feel incredibly fortunate to have got to work on Kinderland after The Censor’s Notebook. Part of what I love about Liliana’s writing is the range, the varied (and important) topics she feels compelled to illuminate in her works. Though the voices of Liliana’s narrators are very different – a 12-year-old girl and a middle-aged communist censor – the sense of humour has something similar in it. I like that Kinderland was a new challenge, but  that it also allowed me to build a kind of continuity of voice for Liliana’s works in English.

WF: Liliana – many of the Kinderland’s scenes start with words like ‘sometimes’, or ‘one time’, or ‘one summer’. These phrases reveal something about the horizons of time in the book – as though it is progressing, yes, but progressing to nowhere in particular; as though a given scene is repeated and repeatable. The physical plot on which the book takes place is circumscribed, too. This is of course about the bounded space and time of childhood, but it felt to me as though it was also about more than that. Could you talk about these ideas a little? And, perhaps relatedly, about what you think drives this story forward.

LC: The idea for the novel came from the story of a traumatised boy I met when visiting my home village in Moldova. His parents both worked abroad, returning for only a month in the summer. He had come to our home with his father, who left the child in the guest house. The child was so afraid that his beloved father would forget him at his strange house that he just looked straight at him, staring, hoping that his father would see him and not forget that he exists. The boy didn’t talk, didn’t play. This is where I started – although that little boy isn’t a character in the novel. My parents were teachers and they told me all kinds of stories about such children. The situation – children left at home, alone, without parents – is a real one. I realised it is was a generalised phenomenon and I wondered what our world would be like tomorrow, wondered if the family institution had changed. In my village, every family has a member who has left for money, at least one migrant. I realised that the most important event in the lives of these children is the arrival of their parents.

‘Waiting’ is the word around which the entire action of the novel revolves. It is the impulse that drives the scenes in the book forwards. The youngest child puts a chair at the gate and waits. They must do so for more than half a year. Children live with the memory of the moments in which they were normal children with parents. I was interested in how they children survive, and how they become dignified people.

WF: ‘A village all our own must exist somewhere, one with its own laws, with a way of life that’s inaccessible and hidden to others. Where life carries on beautifully, generously, compassionately, without meanness, longing, and waiting. A village of good children.’ These lines open a passage quite late in the book; when I reached them, they gave shape to a question I’d been dancing around. Secrets are so important to this book – to life, and to a child’s life, and to a community of children in a particular socio-political context. Could you both talk to me about the power – good and bad – of secrets? You’re very welcome to tell me a secret from your childhood, too, if you’d like…

LC: Maybe it’s not really a secret, because it’s in the book. I describe a scene that seems to belong to the domain of the fantastic – the meeting with the wild boar in the forest – but which is real: in 2010, when I had a scholarship in Stuttgart, I crossed paths with a wild boar in the forest of Akademie Schloss Solitude one evening. I don’t like secrets, really. But mysteries, yes. I believe that children need mysterious, magical experiences; spiritual power, imagination, little ‘secrets’ help these children. And this, although it might not seem like it, is very much related to my very atheistic childhood. We weren’t allowed to go to church, talk about God, read the Bible (a function of a childhood spent in the communist regime), and so we felt the need to invent something unseen, something great. Let’s live in pagan stories, invent our own religion. The power of secrets is a theme as huge as a novel; for the children of Kindereland, it is the power of hope, of patience, of survival.

MC: Absolutely. Secrets are powerful, especially when shared by a group. In the passage you quote, keeping things secret allows for the protection of a way of life worth protecting. Here, it would be the innocence of childhood. A secret that is hard to keep for long. But there are unintentional secrets as well. Something can become a kind of secret, especially for children, when there’s no one to listen to you. An entire inner world can become a secret, including what is causing you pain.

I have a very distinct memory from first grade, when it became a fad to look for four-leaf clovers outside during recess. I remember continuing to look for them into the summer when we moved to a new house. My secret search was related to all that I couldn’t yet put into words about cultural and physical displacement, about a sense of aloneness. So much of Kinderland’s power is in speaking this secret, letting us as adults, and now as English-language readers, in on the secret.

WF: Finally, do you think this is a book of memory or a book of imagination?

MC: If I had to choose between the two, I would choose imagination. because that is the consummate domain of children, and we see this story through Cristina’s eyes. Imagination is also what makes reality bearable and gives us hope that things will get better. That’s what I want for the children of Kinderland.

LC: I think that if I hadn’t been born in a small village, if I hadn’t gone through many of the small experiences I describe, I wouldn’t have been able to write such a book. How to milk a goat, how to put a plantain leaf on a wound, how to cook, how to take care of animals. The main characters are invented – they have no prototypes in reality – so it is a book of imagination. The main situations – the problem of migration, the state of the village, its life and spirit – are based on real data, so it is a book of memory. I cannot separate these two aspects.

When I was little, I could see from the stairs of our house three walnuts on the horizon, which, from a distance, looked blue. At one point, I went with my father to the horizon and saw those three walnuts. There, I felt the emotion described in the novel, attributed to the main character Cristina. And now, when I go home, I look at the horizon to see the three walnuts. They are still there, but Kinderland is not an autobiographical novel.

Liliana Corobca was born in the Republic of Moldova. She made her debut with the novel Negrissimo (2003), winner of the ‘Prometheus’ Prize for a debut awarded by the România literară magazine; the Prize for Prose Debut of the Republic of Moldova Writers’ Union and The Character in Inter war Romanian Novels (2003, translated into Italian and German). Her novels The Censor’s Notebook and most recently Kinderland were both translated into English by Monica Cure and are published by Seven Stories Press.

Monica Cure is a Romanian-American writer, translator, and dialogue specialist. Her poetry and translations have been published in journals internationally, and she’s the author of the book Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century (University of Minnesota Press). Her translation of Liliana Corobca’s The Censor’s Notebook won the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

The post Letting Us Adults In on a Secret: An Interview with Liliana Corobca and Monica Cure appeared first on English PEN.

Michael’s writing centres on poetry, and so it felt apt to incorporate the essence of poetry into his corporeal form through the very same medium. His eyebrows become haikus, his mouth the ever-laughing limerick, his legs bounding ballads. Poetry is eternal; through its creation, the poet becomes immortal.

The poem had its first public reading at the PEN Pinter Prize ceremony, and it was here for the first time that I met my co-performers, students from Argyle Primary School. They put me to shame. They knew their lines by heart (my ancient brain needed the security of pages). They flowed in and out of my reading, becoming the voices of the excited children – life imitating art. Two children on my left saying, ‘It’s him’ and three on my right, ‘He’s here’ – their performance was flawless, and at the end we all stood, rabbits in headlights, grinning from ear to ear. The children clearly didn’t want to leave the stage.

I often invite teachers in CPD (Continual Professional Development) sessions focussed on poetry to write and read a poem in groups. Often, the request is met with silence, or a look of are you serious?,or a shy, embarrassed giggle. We forget how difficult it is to get up on stage and share words. It is especially difficult to do so when you have spent the whole day learning in school, more so when you are performing in front of a bunch of adults!

Oh yeah, and the poet who wrote the poem is on stage with you… oh oh yeah, and the poet the poem is about is in the front row watching! I think most adults, if asked to do this, would have run for the metaphorical hills, not these kids, these kids… most kid, are incredibly brave. Just like Michael’s brave and fearless writing, these kids can inspire us all to get out of our own way, to take a leap, feet first on the meters of our legs, to find the beating poem of our hearts.

Rosen

Voices rise up
out of the auditorium.
the children are hungry for poems.

“Is he here yet?”
“Have you seen him?”
“Do you think he’s coming?”

The drooling children know
there will be poems today,
but who will be reading?

“I hope it’s him, I saw him on Youtube.”
“My Dad’s met him.”
“He visited my mum’s school.”

The children show-off their stories,
of the first poem they heard:

The one about the cake,
The one about the dog,
The one that was too hot.

“I like how he performs.”
“I like how his poems are like life.”
“I like how his poems mean something.”

The auditorium lights start to fade…

“Are you sure he’s coming?”

“I heard he’s coming”

“He must be coming.”

The adults that were standing,
necks craning,
failing to hide their child-like excitement
begin to sit,
feeling the weight
of adult bones once again.

His arrival is signalled by a wave
a tingling,
a collective outpouring of held breath.
a rush of:

“It’s him”,
“he’s here”,
“look over there!”

Smiles and eyes alight
on adult and child alike,
as he rhymes up onto the stage.

The haikus of his eyebrows wiggle,
and the audience are bound-up in poetry
travelling through time
on the meter of his memories.

The limerick of his mouth grins
and the audience are sharing a meal at his table
on the rhythm of his recollections.

The ballads of his legs
bound him across the stage
and giggles and laughter
wash through the theatre,
as they gasp together.

The anthologies of his eyes
hold them all
through the laughter and the thoughts,
through the ponderous delights,
through the gasps and the tears.

“It’s him” whisper the children.
“It’s him” breathe the teachers.
“It’s him” mouth the parents.
“He’s here” say all – remembering the poems
that will thrum within them forever…

“It’s Michael Rosen.”

“It’s Michael Rosen.”

“It’s Michael Rosen.”

Joseph Coelho is a multi-award-winning children’s author and playwright. His YA ‘Story told in poems’ The Girl Who Became A Tree’ was shortlisted for The 2021 Carnegie Medal and received a special mention from the Bologna Ragazzi Award 2021. He has written plays for Little Angel Theatre, Tutti Frutti Productions, Polka Theatre and The Unicorn Theatre amongst others. He is two-time winner of the Indie Book Awards (2019 & 2022) with Picture Books ‘If All The World Were… and ‘My Beautiful Voice’ respectively ‘(illu. Allison Colpoys). His Poetry Collection Werewolf Club Rules (Illu. John O’leary) won the 2015 CLIPPA Poetry Award. His plays for adults have received a special commendation from the Verity Bargate Award and been longlisted for the Bruntwood Playwriting Competition. He is Waterstones Children’s Laureate 2022 – 2024

Photo credit: Hayley Madden/Poetry Society

The post It’s Michael Rosen! appeared first on English PEN.

I wanted to portray a responsible girl, who does what she ought to but also has a strong will, who’s fun and a little bit naughty but also touching, who is in a complicated situation but finds balance through things she can rely on – comics, dolls, her relationship with her grandmother. I wanted her to have a particular idea of religion in which the Christian God served as a mediator for her worship of her mother as a higher deity; I wanted to show how communication problems occur from such a young age – how she relates to her grandmother, for example, and how she falls out with some of the children around her because she can’t grasp their social codes. My idea was to create a composite character – like a cake full of knives, or a knife stained with a red liquid that turns out to be strawberry jam – and work with these mixed feelings that exist simultaneously, because, to me, childhood is a period of extremes, with many contradictory, coexistent layers.

Marina has such a unique voice; it is both hilarious and incredibly moving in its profundity. How did you and your translator, Charlotte Whittle, work together to capture this voice in English?

Charlotte was very respectful, asking me about historical context and local expressions – she gave me total confidence, and I was fascinated by what her questions were. She also showed me a draft of the first chapter, to see if I thought the tone was right, and I loved it right from the beginning. I thought it was a fantastic translation, where non-literal equivalencies made for a shared effect.

Oldladyvoice is your first book translated into English. You’ve spoken elsewhere about the satisfaction this brings you, but specifically that ‘it feels . . . as though the words have more value now that they’ve been translated by Charlotte than they did when I wrote them.’ Could I ask you to speak about this, and what you feel happened to your words in the process of translation?

I think that has to do with it being the first time I saw myself translated, and also with prejudices around the English language. I was so used to my own words that they had lost their meaning; seeing them transformed gave them back their value. There’s also the concrete value of English, a language I’ve known since I was a child and that, for different cultural reasons, I’ve deeply respected and even idealised. It’s silly, but seeing myself translated by Charlotte made me feel like a “real writer” for the first time. My main source for finding the book’s style was the writing of John Fante, something I had discussed with Charlotte and that she had taken into account, and it was fascinating to see myself in his language.

The story takes place over a summer in 1993, at what feels like a pivotal moment in Spain’s history: Franco’s brutal dictatorship is still a recent memory for many, but there’s a sense of hope for the future. As Marina remarks, ‘the nineties are all that stands between us and what’s next.’ You were also a child of the 1990s. In what way did coming of age in this decade influence you and your writing? And what impact does it have on Marina?

I was interested in several aspects of the nineties, and I drew confidence from knowing first-hand and in depth what they were like, what it was like to be there. It is true that numbers have the power to influence us, and the millennium had an air of conclusion about it – an ending before the beginning of something else. In Spain in particular, there was a certain mood of triumph in the air after all the suffering the civil war and the long dictatorship brought, with the Seville Expo ’92 and the Barcelona Olympics happening around the same time. It was superficial, but it made a huge impression on children, who are so sensitive to advertising campaigns and who truly hoped for a bright future thanks to that vibe. I chose 1993 because it coincided with the hangover of these big events, which left the atmosphere of a burst bubble behind them, and a terrible drought that summer, which seemed an appropriate accompaniment to the protagonist’s psychology. And because of the re-election of Felipe González, a president beloved by many women at the time, which offered the counterpoint of a social phenomenon with a dose of humour.

Marina is obsessed with El Víbora, a subversive cult comic for adults published in Spain between 1979 and 2004, subtitled ‘Comix for Survivors’ (in reference to those who lived through Spain’s 40-year dictatorship). There are several concurrent stories of survival in the novel: Marina’s attempt to survive childhood; her mother’s battle to survive illness; and the survival of national trauma throughout the twentieth century. In what way are these stories of survival linked?

The characters in Marina’s comics are all transgressive in some way: they’re sex workers, addicts and troublemakers, but, to Marina, they’re ‘a formidable army backing her up’ who ‘fill her with hope’ and show her the ‘path to salvation’. Why is it that Marina is drawn to these characters and their creators? Do you yourself find comfort and courage in the outsiders of literature?

These characters shed light on forbidden topics that tend to awaken a magnetic curiosity in children precisely because they’re issues swathed in mystery and secrecy. They’re marginal characters who face a lot of obstacles, and so Marina identifies with their difficulties, seeing them as heroic figures who can handle major (and often unfair) pressures. She also finds inspiration in the comics because of the quality of the stories and the style in which their authors present them: the idea that such a job exists – of telling complicated, beautiful, raw stories that are entertaining and spine-chilling, full of contrasts – gives her hope. It’s an artistic job to which she can aspire; it means that there are people earning a living from this work underground, earning money from telling those stories. That’s the path to salvation I ended up taking myself, the one walked by outsider creators in all disciplines, because when I could no longer stick to academic study, that path was there for me and for anyone who needed it; comics taught me a way to tell stories that I was at ease with, and taught me that there were alternatives to official career paths. Showing both the distress and enlightenment they brought to that generation was an affectionate tribute.

I think people are often dismissive of child narrators in the same way they’re dismissive of children in real life, assuming they lack perspective on the world, a notion that Marina subverts with endearing effect. Was this a consideration for you when writing the book, and why did you choose to write from this perspective?

The perspectives of children and young people have always interested me because they give voice to an excruciating tenderness that makes you laugh and bleed at the same time. Childhood and youth are periods so rich in nuance that I never tire of stories about these stages of life. There’s also a certain vindication of the complexity of those experiences and psychological phases, an urge to demand respect and dignity for people going through them and not being taken very seriously. I realised I was obsessed with these issues, and that I tended to write stories about younger people, so I decided to delve into that as much as I could in the novel form, where I could fully embrace the voice of a child, get it out of my system and put it into words, in case I forgot what it had been like to be a child. I wanted to take advantage of that information and leave myself a kind of handbook for the future, to prevent myself from turning into one of those adults who seem not to remember anything of youth.

In a similar way, I think some readers may be shocked to read about a 9-year-old girl who is so compelled by sex and violence, often conflating the two in her mind and making herself the protagonist in her fantasies. I found this aspect of the book so interesting, and I feel more and more writers are exploring the complexities of children’s interior lives. Did you have any apprehension when tackling this aspect of the novel? Did the freedom required to write this story come to you easily?

I was convinced that thoughts like these take place in the minds of many children, but I knew those passages would be somewhat troubling. I had published a couple of experimental books where I’d written with ferocious freedom, and so I had practice and confidence in addressing those themes that made it come easily. But, at times, I tried not to go so far in this book, toning things down slightly in some parts so they wouldn’t be as brutal. Even so, I know some readers find them shocking. My Spanish publisher asked me if I was sure about the passages, but I was certain that I had already toned it down quite a bit. I’m not the first to have portrayed this kind of complexity and I won’t be the last, and I’m happy to belong to that tribe.

It feels like what Marina wants most is to be seen and understood – by her peers, but also by the adults in her life. Is there something we can learn from the novel about how we relate to and treat children?

Well, I suppose a nice conclusion would be that it’s possible to communicate deeply with children if they’re treated considerately and spoken to naturally and with interest, taking into account their points of view, their circumstances, and the fact that they’re human beings with enormous ability for perception and reflection. We can take people seriously without being tactless.

Marina is an impossible character to forget. Has she stayed with you since you finished writing the book, and has she changed you in any way?

When I was writing the book, I had a huge catalogue of scenes with her at different points in her development: looking at the cutlery drawer from above and below, sitting and watching TV with her grandmother, tossing and turning in bed unable to sleep – endless reels of images that I visualised. With time, one of these has remained with particular force, and when I think of Marina, I always picture her sitting alone on the kerb, eating an ice-cream, with the slightly strained expression of someone pondering difficult matters but at the same time concentrating on enjoying the ice-cream’s flavour and refreshment. Now that you ask, I think the way she’s changed me has to do with her giving me the chance to let go of all the information I gathered from working in such depth on her character. I spent years taking notes on childhood, my own and that of others, and I stored up that information against the clock, fearing that it might get blurry as time went by. Publishing this book, and the fact that it worked as a kind of essay on childhood, has lightened my load – she has lightened my load.

Finally, speak to me about your friend, the author Andrea Abreu. While different in tone, Abreu’s debut novel Dogs of Summer can be read as an interesting companion piece to Oldladyvoice. Do you see your and Abreu’s novels as belonging to a new literary tradition?

I don’t know if it’s new, since we both have sources in the past that have shown us the way, many of them shared. But I do think there’s a shared spirit when it comes to our interest in exploring the raw and the beautiful, the broken and the tender in all their richness. I do feel that our works communicate in some way, and not just because they tackle similar periods in terms of the protagonists’ ages. Andrea told me, at some point, that Oldladyvoice was an inspiration to her. And for me, reading Dogs of Summer gave me back the purity of creative energy that at the time I felt had slipped through my hands. It filled me with courage and set me on the path to my next book.

Elisa Victoria was born in Seville in 1985. She has published two books of short stories, Porn & Pains in 2013, and La sombra de los pinos in 2018, and has contributed to several anthologies. Her debut novel, Oldladyvoice, was published in Spanish in 2019 to great critical acclaim and was selected as Book of the Week by El País. It hs been translated into English, Italian and Portuguese. Her latest works are the novel El Evangelio, and El quicio, an illustrated book in collaboration with the artist Mireia Pérez, both published in 2021.

Charlotte Whittle’s work has appeared in The Literary Review, Los Angeles Times, Guernica, BOMB, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. Her translations include novels by Jorge Comensal, Elisa Victoria, and Norah Lange; her most recent translation is Papyrus, the international bestseller by Irene Vallejo. She lives in England and New York.

Interview by Zoe Sadler, English PEN.

Photo credit: Joaquín León.

The post A Cake Full of Knives: An Interview with Elisa Victoria appeared first on English PEN.

The plan was to write a ghost story (just like my first book was supposed to be a cricket story). So I began with a traditional ghost story with jump scares and murders, and the only thing that was interesting in that draft was the ghost on the bus, a dead reporter called Maali Almeida. When I knew the story would be told by a dead man, I had to imagine some sort of afterlife. That took a few more drafts. But the idea of the dead speaking, and imagining the voices of Sri Lanka’s war victims, that was very much present throughout.

There are a few rules about what the book’s ghosts can do: only being able to go where their corpse has been or where their name is spoken, travelling on the winds. How much were these rules – and some of the wider world-making – purely strategies or devices in order to allow the book to function and the plot to move, and how much were they more than that?

I had a bunch of rules that I borrowed from ghost tropes, religions, philosophies and near-death experiences. In the end, they got pared right down, and I only used those that served the plot or character – the Seven Moon deadline, the use of winds, the significance of ears and the power of your name being spoken. But the idea that powerful spirits can whisper thoughts into the ears of the living and influence their actions also became a possible explanation for why some Sri Lankans continue to do strange and absurd things.

The second person is so incredibly hard to do well, but I love your ‘you’. When in the writing and drafting of it did that perspective appear, and why?

I had to imagine a disembodied voice telling a story. I figured that if anything survives the death of your body, it must be the voice in your head. I’m not sure about everyone else’s heads, but the voice in mine is in the second person. It’s speaking to me now. And that’s the way Maali spoke to himself, so I went with that, and the story seemed to flow. It later made sense to me that the second-person narrator and the person Maali Almeida are not exactly the same – something that the audio version of the book cleverly picks up on.

I loved Chinaman, your debut novel. Why did I have to wait so long for your next one? (It was well worth the wait, by the way.)

Thank you. The usual excuses, really. I got married, had kids, moved country, became a freelancer. I didn’t expect to be writing a second novel, so I struggled to find time for it. I’m better organised now, and my kids are better behaved, so the third one might not take as long.

Maali’s character is based partly on Richard de Zoysa, who, like Maali, was a gay man in Colombo in 1989. What was your experience of writing a character whose sexuality is such an important part of the book, but whose sexuality is, as you’ve said elsewhere, not your own?

This was a big challenge, and I took it seriously. I read Vidal, Genet, Crisp and Selvadurai, watched Boys in the Band multiple times (the original Friedkin version) and talked to gay men who lived in Sri Lanka during the 80s. Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke’s ground-breaking play about Sri Lankan Grindr culture, The One Who Loves You So, really opened my eyes to how gay characters can be portrayed without evoking lazy tropes.

What are you most hopeful for and what are you most fearful of after having won the Booker?

The fear is that I won’t write much of anything over the next twelve months. This was confirmed by a very exhausted Damon Galgut just after the Booker. ‘You won’t write a word, my friend,’ he said kindly, but seriously. ‘It’s one big lit fest for the next year,’ He’s a terrific writer and The Promise is a magnificent book, but I do hope to prove him wrong. The win will bring more readers and less financial uncertainty, but I hope I don’t get too distracted and forget to put in the writing hours for the next book.

I want to ask what I know will be a complex and fraught question, but what I think is an important one. You’ve spoken elsewhere about ‘not being brave enough’ to set a book in contemporary Sri Lanka or its recent past, and instead going back into the country’s history for this book. You’ve written a novel that confronts and bears witness to the atrocities of that history (‘I was there to witness. That is all’ is a very good line at an important moment in the middle of Seven Moons)while also satirising it and finding comedy in it. But of course that history – 1989, and the years running up to it – is living history for many people. Did that, and their experiences and traumas, weigh on you when you were writing The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida? Do you think the book’s recognition risks being co-opted as a way for history to move on from those atrocities.

I hope the opposite. I hope that it’ll encourage more Sri Lankans to write about and unpack the past, and that a new generation of readers who’ve grown up with the internet will go back and read about histories that they’re not taught in schools. History and Sri Lanka may seem to have moved on now, with fresh catastrophes to create narratives around. But hopefully readers and writers can engage with the past and take some lessons from it.

You spoke in Tamil, Sinhala and English when accepting the Booker Prize. How important was that, for you?

I’m glad I was able to thank everyone and speak in all three languages (even though I did a poor job of keeping to my one-minute limit). I’m fluent in Sinhala but not as articulate as I’d like to be, and am only just learning Tamil. But I wanted this to be a victory not just for English-speaking, middle-class Colombo Sri Lankans, but for all Sri Lankans, regardless of which language they read or write in.

Finally, is writing (perhaps life) all just a gamble, a game of chance and probabilities?

That’s certainly what Maali thinks. We’d all do well to acknowledge the huge role luck plays in our life, though people may refer to it by different names. Of course you welcome an outrageous fortune like the Booker, but you need to be aware that no one can keep rolling sixes, and that it’d be foolish to expect to.

Shehan Karunatilaka is the winner of the 2022 Booker Prize for his second novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. His debut novel, Chinaman (2011) won the Commonwealth Book Prize and Gratiaen Prize. Born in Sri Lanka, he studied in New Zealand and has lived in London, Amsterdam and Singapore. He currently lives in Colombo with his family, his guitars and his notes for new stories.

Interview by Will Forrester, Editor

Photo credit: Dominic Sansoni.

The post The Third One Might Not Take as Long: An Interview with Shehan Karunatilaka appeared first on English PEN.