{"id":75314,"date":"2017-08-16T15:40:19","date_gmt":"2017-08-16T04:40:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.booktopia.com.au\/?p=75314"},"modified":"2017-08-18T17:26:37","modified_gmt":"2017-08-18T06:26:37","slug":"writing-advice-will-make-reconsider-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/2017\/08\/16\/writing-advice-will-make-reconsider-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"This writing advice will make you reconsider your strategy."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>
\nThe longlist, or \u2018Man Booker Dozen\u2019, for the \u00a350,000 Man Booker Prize<\/a> was recently announced. We chat with Kamila Shamsie about her longlitsed book, Home Fire,<\/em><\/a> a contemporary and fiercely compelling retelling of\u00a0 Sophocles’ Antigone. <\/em><\/p>\n

Kamila Shamsie is a Pakistani author born in 1973 in Karachi. She is the author of In the City by the Sea<\/em>, Kartography<\/em> (both shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Salt and Saffron<\/em> and Broken Verses<\/em>. Burnt Shadows<\/em> was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and has been translated into over 20 languages.<\/p>\n

1. To begin with why don\u2019t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Born and raised in Karachi, went to university in America, lived a fairly nomadic life moving between Karachi, London and upstate New York for about a decade after university, and finally stopped (sort of) in London about ten years ago.<\/p>\n

2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A novelist, a novelist, a novelist.\u00a0 It\u2019s the only thing I\u2019ve ever wanted to do. Why? Because reading novels was the first great love of my life.<\/p>\n

3. What strongly held belief did you have at eighteen that you do not have now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That the world was moving inexorably in the direction of progress.<\/p>\n

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4. What were three works of art \u2013 book or painting or piece of music, etc \u2013 you can now say, had a great effect on you and influenced your own development as a writer?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Influence is such a difficult one to pin down, particularly as you get older. But, with that caveat, here are three works of art that made me think differently about writing – Ingmar Bergman\u2019s movie The Silence<\/em>; Agha Shahid Ali\u2019s poetry collection The Country Without a Post Office<\/em>; Sara Suleri\u2019s memoir Meatless Days<\/em>.<\/p>\n

5. Considering the innumerable artistic avenues open to you, why did you choose to write a novel?\u00a0\u00a0 |<\/strong><\/p>\n

I never had innumerable avenues.\u00a0 The novel is the form I\u2019ve always loved, and understood, in a way that isn’t true of any other art form. And I knew how to write sentences, from an early age, in a way that I didn\u2019t know how to draw or act or dance or sing\u2026<\/p>\n

6. Please tell us about your latest novel\u2026.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Home Fire<\/em><\/a> is the story of 3 British Muslim siblings who\u2019ve grown up in a house of secrets, related to the jihadi father they never knew. The two sisters try to break free of their father\u2019s legacy, while the brother is drawn towards it. Things get further complicated when both sisters meet the attractive son of the Home Secretary, himself a British Muslim, and have to decide how much to tell him about their father, their brother, and their own feelings and motivations.<\/p>\n

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7. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m interested in getting a range of responses to my work – obviously, you always want your work to make people both feel and think, but I enjoy it particularly when someone tells me something unexpected about how or why one of my novels spoke to them.<\/p>\n

8. Whom do you most admire in the realm of writing and why?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since the idea of Home Fire<\/em> comes from Sophocles\u2019 Antigone<\/em><\/a> I\u2019ve done a lot of thinking abut how extraordinary a play it is –\u00a0 very much of its times and yet continuing to speak to us 2,500 years after it was written.<\/p>\n

9. Many artists set themselves very ambitious goals. What are yours?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Write better next time.<\/p>\n\n\t\t