Victoria on the BBC’s “Inheritance Tracks” discussing songs inherited from her parents and songs she would pass on to her children
Featuring Take Five by Dave Brubeck and Pio Poli by Michalis Hatzigiannis
Victoria Hislop has returned to the islands of Greece for her new book, and her first novel for children, Maria’s Island.
She joined the Graham Norton Radio Show with Waitrose to chat about how she adapted the book from her original novel The Island.
Explaining why she was suprised she didn’t have more pushback adapting from fiction for adults to fiction for children, she says: “I haven’t held back with either the ideas or with some of the vocabulary”
“The setting is principally a little island called Spinalonga which is just off the coast of Crete, which for 50 years was a place where people with leprosy were sent during the period when it was still an incurable disease and they needed to be isolated, so almost worldwide the law said that if you were diagnosed with it, you had to go into a place of isolation.”
Victoria is an ambassador for Lepra, who raise money to treat sufferers of leprosy around the world.
So how did she bring the subject manager down to a children’s eye-view? “In my book The Island, which takes place over a couple of decades, we have a family where two generations are afflicted by this disease. What I suddenly realised last year was that my principal characters were actually children, even in the adult book” she explains.
“And when a schoolteacher out in Crete said to me ‘I’d love to read the island to my class but it’s a little bit adult’ I realised that I could actually adapt it for children, because I think generally children like to read about children.”
“So I just took the main characters in the early chapters in the original book and just led them all the way through and it actually wasn’t that difficult to do because, as I say, children’s emotions and reactions were very much at the core of the original.”
Sunday Times “Bestsellers of the Year”Thrilled to be in the top ten bestselling hardback novels of 2020.
Huge thanks to my publisher, Headline,
to my agent, Jonathan Lloyd at Curtis Brown,
and to all booksellers and readers!
See all the Times Bestseller lists here (paywalled)
“I visited a unique Cretan company today, Biorama, which produces spectacularly beautiful and therapeutic products using organic plants and herbs grown on the hillside outside Agios Nikolaos.
In co-operation with archaeologists, they have brought to light rare ingredients used 4,000 years ago and studied ancient methods of preparation. The results are unique and totally organic.”
You can find out more about them here https://www.bioaroma.gr/gb/
Victoria was officially sworn-in as a Greek citizen during a ceremony in Athens on Thursday.
The author in July had been granted the Greek citizenship by Hellenic Republic President Aikaterini Sakellaropoulou for her contribution to the promotion of Greece’s history and traditions through her books. She was officially sworn-in as a Greek citizen at the Interior Ministry by Citizenship Secretary General Athanasios Balerbas. After the ceremony, Victoria Hislop was received at the Maximos Mansion by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis who thanked her for supporting Greece. “I want to thank you for your pure love for Greece, which is reflected in everything you do and write,” Mitsotakis said. He went on to note that the honorary citizenship process is an opportunity to recognize people who are “Greeks at heart”.
On her part, Hislop gave the Prime Minister a copy of her latest book titled “Those who are loved”. She also said that she had been feeling Greek for a long time. “I love Greece with its problems and its difficulties, not only for its beauty. I love everything,” she added. Hislop visits Greece very often and has a second home on the island of Crete. “The Island”, one of her many best-selling novels is set on Spinalonga, an island off the coast of Crete that was Greece’s leprosy colony for much of the 20th century. The book was adapted by Greece’s Mega Channel as a 26-episode series titled “To Nisi”, which premiered on Greek television in October 2010 and was considered a huge success among viewers and TV critics.
Novelist Victoria Hislop has found ‘the storytelling spark’ in Crete, Thessaloniki and the streets of Athens. Who better to ask for an inspirational guide to their highlights?
(from The Telegraph, October 27, 2020)
Greece has become more than a second home – it has also given me a second citizenship. In September, I swore my oath of allegiance to the Hellenic Republic and the day of the ceremony included meetings with the president, the prime minister and the general secretary of internal affairs. I am now the proud possessor of Greek identity.
Many of my Greek friends, smiling sardonically, tell me that I will now stop loving this country. A standard position in Greece is to be immensely patriotic but also deeply jaded and critical of everything about it. So far, I have felt no such transformation. The landscapes, the history and the people still provide constant inspiration.
With six novels behind me and 10 stops on each book tour, I have travelled the length and breadth of the country promoting the Greek editions. I have been to the north, to the Albanian border where bears sometimes appear, to the east (where Turkey is in view) and down to the southernmost town in Crete on the Libyan sea.
The contrasts in landscape and culture are fairly extreme – mountains, plateaux, rivers, lakes, hot springs, volcanoes; Greece has it all. It’s problematic to talk about my favourite places because I have thousands and I have not found anywhere lacking its own idiosyncratic charm.
As I write, I am sitting in the terrace café of the Acropolis Museum. It’s early October and I keep glancing up at the Parthenon’s golden stones under a blue sky, grateful for the light breeze. The temple is iconic and for many it represents some of the best things about this country, not least beauty and the aesthetic principles that the West have followed for millennia.
