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Steven Galloway was nothing like I expected him to be. The tall, lanky and relaxed author is warm, friendly, and above all else, very funny.
Quite the opposite of his book, The Cellist of Sarajevo, which is a fictionalised account of the 1992 - 1996 Sarajevo siege, told from the perspective of three ordinary civilians.
I sat down to ask him a few questions. Here's what he had to say.
Q. How important do you think it is for international communities to lend their support to growing South African reading communities?
A: I think it's really important. And I think it's important that it goes both ways with any book festival, and from the perspective of the audience.
Here's an example: say someone from Cape Town comes, sits in the audience and sees one of their own writers like Damon Galgut or Henrietta Rose-Innes, and an international author alongside on that specific platform, they're essentially seeing a conversation taking place.
It's an opportunity for readers out there to see that South Africa literature can hold its own on the world stage.
The world is getting smaller and smaller and the writer and literature community should be paying attention to not only what's going on in New York and London, but also to what's going on in Cape Town, Vancouver, Sydney and all over the place, which it is not historically, particularly good at doing.
Q: How do you think we can international communities to read South African literature? What do we need to do from our side?
A: Well, I can tell you that as a Canadian, one of the things I benefitted from enormously from is that the Canadian government spends a fair amount of money (not in this instance), paying to send various writers abroad as cultural ambassadors.
Countries don't seem to have a problem sending a bunch of businessmen to China, or anywhere else, but they don't do it for authors. And I would argue from both an economical and cultural point that we are every bit as important to what countries are doing.
I don't want to be criticising the South African, but I have heard anecdotally, that their arts funding is not as generous as it perhaps could be, so that would be a good place to start.
I think South Africa right now, from my point of view, is maybe how Canadian literature was 10 or 15 years ago. Just starting to make headway into the international community and I think that South Africa is going in the right direction. These things do take a lot of time.
Q: When I think of how we focus on events like September 11, I can't help but think that Sarajevo's story, although recorded, seems to be so unknown and forgotten. Was this a driving factor behind your motivation for writing The Cellist of Sarajevo?
A: It might not have been a driving motivator, but it was definitely very much in my consciousness. For some reason, when I first started the book, the war had ended slightly less than 10 years previously.
And for me, at least, I get the feeling that people do seem to have forgotten about it.
It also seems to have been relegated and largely ignored. And for me, I consider it a recent event that I feel, has been overlooked at least in certain areas.
I think the ethnic aspect of the war has been reported to death, but the larger aspects of it, was never really focused on.
So yes, that was definitely on my mind.
Q: The book is structured in such a way that you have three main characters. Why did you choose this as a format, and what was your reasoning behind choosing Arrow, the central female character of your story, to be a counter-sniper?
A: The book has three main characters because of The Cellist's piece he plays. The Cellist plays Albinoni's Adagio, which is a piece that was reconstructed from a sonata. I'm an incredible nerd about these sort of things, so I thought, why not write a book that takes an adagio and turns it back into a sonata.
The book is structured like a trio sonata, which is a sonata in which there is one melody and two main parts and if you were to play any one of the parts on its own, it would sound like its own piece of music.
With these, they're actually suppose to sound like they're on their own, but when you put them together it becomes a whole piece.
As for Arrow, she's the melody. I stumbled across an interesting factoid that in the war in Sarajevo, the first and quite possibly one of the only times, women made up a significant number of snipers.
Generally, snipers are a really elite, military unit, so you don't really find many women snipers at all, but in Sarajevo, partly because of the civilian conscripted issue, partly because women in Sarajevo knew how to shoot guns because it was a popular sport, a high percentage of snipers were actually women.
Q: What do you think are some of the main challenges that Canadian and international authors face in a market dominated by mostly American literature?
A: One of the obvious things that someone once said to me is that no one can buy your book if they don't know it exists. And it's getting increasingly more difficult for if you are writing a book, and for anyone who might like to read that particular kind of book, to even know that exists.
There's so many more books being published every day.
You know there's more books being published in Britain every day than in places like Canada. In Canada, there is something like 180 novels being published a year, and I'm not even counting self-published works.
I can't read a 180 novels a year, so getting someone to really like your book and to even know that a book such as yours exist is the single greatest challenge I think we face.
If someone sees your book, and doesn't think it sounds good, or like they'd want to read it, then that's fine, but at least they got to make the choice because they knew about it in the first place.
Read our review of The Cellist of Sarajevo here.
Quite the opposite of his book, The Cellist of Sarajevo, which is a fictionalised account of the 1992 - 1996 Sarajevo siege, told from the perspective of three ordinary civilians.
I sat down to ask him a few questions. Here's what he had to say.
Q. How important do you think it is for international communities to lend their support to growing South African reading communities?
A: I think it's really important. And I think it's important that it goes both ways with any book festival, and from the perspective of the audience.
Here's an example: say someone from Cape Town comes, sits in the audience and sees one of their own writers like Damon Galgut or Henrietta Rose-Innes, and an international author alongside on that specific platform, they're essentially seeing a conversation taking place.
It's an opportunity for readers out there to see that South Africa literature can hold its own on the world stage.
The world is getting smaller and smaller and the writer and literature community should be paying attention to not only what's going on in New York and London, but also to what's going on in Cape Town, Vancouver, Sydney and all over the place, which it is not historically, particularly good at doing.
Q: How do you think we can international communities to read South African literature? What do we need to do from our side?
A: Well, I can tell you that as a Canadian, one of the things I benefitted from enormously from is that the Canadian government spends a fair amount of money (not in this instance), paying to send various writers abroad as cultural ambassadors.
Countries don't seem to have a problem sending a bunch of businessmen to China, or anywhere else, but they don't do it for authors. And I would argue from both an economical and cultural point that we are every bit as important to what countries are doing.
I don't want to be criticising the South African, but I have heard anecdotally, that their arts funding is not as generous as it perhaps could be, so that would be a good place to start.
I think South Africa right now, from my point of view, is maybe how Canadian literature was 10 or 15 years ago. Just starting to make headway into the international community and I think that South Africa is going in the right direction. These things do take a lot of time.
Q: When I think of how we focus on events like September 11, I can't help but think that Sarajevo's story, although recorded, seems to be so unknown and forgotten. Was this a driving factor behind your motivation for writing The Cellist of Sarajevo?
A: It might not have been a driving motivator, but it was definitely very much in my consciousness. For some reason, when I first started the book, the war had ended slightly less than 10 years previously.
And for me, at least, I get the feeling that people do seem to have forgotten about it.
It also seems to have been relegated and largely ignored. And for me, I consider it a recent event that I feel, has been overlooked at least in certain areas.
I think the ethnic aspect of the war has been reported to death, but the larger aspects of it, was never really focused on.
So yes, that was definitely on my mind.
Q: The book is structured in such a way that you have three main characters. Why did you choose this as a format, and what was your reasoning behind choosing Arrow, the central female character of your story, to be a counter-sniper?
A: The book has three main characters because of The Cellist's piece he plays. The Cellist plays Albinoni's Adagio, which is a piece that was reconstructed from a sonata. I'm an incredible nerd about these sort of things, so I thought, why not write a book that takes an adagio and turns it back into a sonata.
The book is structured like a trio sonata, which is a sonata in which there is one melody and two main parts and if you were to play any one of the parts on its own, it would sound like its own piece of music.
With these, they're actually suppose to sound like they're on their own, but when you put them together it becomes a whole piece.
As for Arrow, she's the melody. I stumbled across an interesting factoid that in the war in Sarajevo, the first and quite possibly one of the only times, women made up a significant number of snipers.
Generally, snipers are a really elite, military unit, so you don't really find many women snipers at all, but in Sarajevo, partly because of the civilian conscripted issue, partly because women in Sarajevo knew how to shoot guns because it was a popular sport, a high percentage of snipers were actually women.
Q: What do you think are some of the main challenges that Canadian and international authors face in a market dominated by mostly American literature?
A: One of the obvious things that someone once said to me is that no one can buy your book if they don't know it exists. And it's getting increasingly more difficult for if you are writing a book, and for anyone who might like to read that particular kind of book, to even know that exists.
There's so many more books being published every day.
You know there's more books being published in Britain every day than in places like Canada. In Canada, there is something like 180 novels being published a year, and I'm not even counting self-published works.
I can't read a 180 novels a year, so getting someone to really like your book and to even know that a book such as yours exist is the single greatest challenge I think we face.
If someone sees your book, and doesn't think it sounds good, or like they'd want to read it, then that's fine, but at least they got to make the choice because they knew about it in the first place.
Read our review of The Cellist of Sarajevo here.
