Hensher, Shamsie, Naparstek

Philip Hensher

It’s a potent combination, even if you discount the Liner Notes-induced head fuzz. Philip Hensher and Kamila Shamsie sat down this morning with Ben Naparstek to ‘have a little chat to each other’ about history as a basis for fiction writing.

For Shamsie, there are two types of people — those who have the ‘luxury of believing that their lives are separate from history’ and those who know that this isn’t the case. Discovering history is a way of building character — she had created a minor character, a Japanese woman, and became interested in searching for the ‘truth about women in Japan’, not the ‘idea of the demure Japanese woman’. But you’ll have to write a while for her ‘Pakistani science-fiction novel’. Sometimes historical fact gets in the way of beautiful fiction: Shamsie once wrote a scene featuring riotous beds of azaleas, but she discovered that at the time the scene was set, Nagasaki was going through a food shortage and in reality all the flowerbeds had been pulled out and replaced with vegetables.

Philip Hensher suggested, rather wickedly, that ‘people use “history” to refer to any event of significance’. He then riffed about

Kamila Shamsie

some of his own rather dubious encounters with ‘history’, such as the time he saw the Queen on the street: ‘I love the Queen, I think she’s marvellous’. Hensher thinks that most historical fiction focuses on the situation’s ‘innocent bystander’: ‘If you look at most great novels about historical events, they’re not about the main actors in those events.’ Great figures are difficult to get into a novel because the reader already knows too much about them. But Hensher also has some special plans for the Prime Minister: ‘I would love to write a book about Gordon Brown in retirement.’

Estelle Tang, 3000 BOOKS
Festival Blogger

2009 MWF authors – another 2

Two more authors, as announced in the last MWF e-bulletin:

Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie

Shortlisted for Orange Prize for Fiction in 2009, Kamila Shamsie will be one of our international guests at the festival. Kamila was born in 1973 in Pakistan and is the author of four previous novels: In the City by the Sea, Kartography (both shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Salt and Saffron and Broken Verses. In 1999 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature and in 2004 the Patras Bokhari Award – both awarded by the Pakistan Academy of Letters. Kamila now lives in London.

Bolder and more ambitious than her previous novels, Burnt Shadows is a major novel, set against the backdrop of war, of intersecting lives of people from different nations and cultures. If you are a fan of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, or The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai you will enjoy Kamila Shamsie.

An absorbing novel that commands, in the reader, a powerful emotional and intellectual response Kamila Shamsie is a writer of immense strength.

Salman Rushdie

Jeff Sparrow

Jeff Sparrow

Jeff Sparrow is a well known face in literary Melbourne (and the photo has have given us does not do him justice!) Currently the editor of the literary journal, Overland, he first came to our attention with an intriguing slant on Melbourne, Radical Melbourne: A Secret History and Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within. Both books should be on every Melbournian’s bookshelf. He is also the author of Communism: A Love Story (shortlisted for the 2007 Colin Roderick Award) and, his most recent book, Killing: Misadventures in Violence.

Ninety years after the First World War, the discovery of the mummified head of a Turkish soldier – a bullet-ridden souvenir brought home from Gallipoli by a returning Anzac – launched Jeff on a quest to understand the nature of deadly violence. How did ordinary people – whether in today’s wars or in 1915 – learn to take a human life? Was it hard to kill another person or was it terrifyingly easy? What did war do to soldiers to make hoarding a human head seem normal, even necessary? The questions lead Jeff on a journey through history and across the US, talking to veterans and slaughtermen, executioners and academics about one of the last remaining taboos. Compassionate, engaged and political, Killing takes us up close to the ways society kills today, in a prolonged meditation on what violence means, not just for perpetrators but for all of us.