Victoria Hislop on “Inheritance Tracks”
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
Interview
Victoria Hislop talks to Graham Norton about her new book Maria’s Island
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.”
Interview with Sloane Square Magazine
Svelte and dressed in black, Victoria Hislop looks healthy and relaxed as she sits at a corner table for afternoon tea. The sun is out, there’s a pleasant hubbub in the cafe and for a moment 1 imagine we’re in Greece, such is her ability to transport us through her stories (her readership totals 10 million). She is telling me about her latest novel, Those Who Are Loved, which promises to be her most fascinating odyssey yet.
(read Sloane Square Magazine online)
We are in fact sitting beside the King’s Road, Victoria having just arrived from a Pilates class at nearby Heartcore. She is now describing a different journey, closer to home. “I’d always wanted to live on the King’s Road,” she says. “Gradually I worked my way up through South London, at a time when taxis didn’t always agree to go south of the river. The King’s Road always had this incredible buzz, this atmosphere. I can’t imagine living anywhere else in London now.”
Favourite haunts today include Colbert in Sloane Square, where she enjoys a glass of house champagne and the chopped chicken salad. “I like food that doesn’t get in the way of conversation and isn’t over-priced,” she says. “The new Granger & Co. in Pavilion Road is also very good.”
Being able to walk to places is one of the great joys of living in Chelsea, she feels. “You can walk into the West End. I walk to the London Library, which is like my office. Going about on foot lets me take things in. Have you seen the new blue plaque for P. L. Travers, creator of Mar}’ Poppins, on the corner of Smith Street?” She points across the King’s Road to it.
The last time we saw each other, we were squashed onto a table at a Christmas book event in our local Waterstones together with William Boyd, another author living near the King’s Road. “He is one of only a handful of authors whose latest book I’ll pre-order without knowing anything more about it, so good is his prose.”
Much of her time is spent at an apartment she rents in Athens. She first fell in love with Greece by visiting Athens in the Seventies. “I also have a place in Crete where I do lots of writing.” Her books have been translated into more than 35 languages and she travels to various foreign sales territories, too. “It turns out my books sell very well in Norway. Perhaps they like to travel somewhere sunny through my stories.”
But her latest book, Those Who Are Loved, visits one of the darkest chapters of modern Greek history – the Nazi occupation and the ensuing civil war. “The right-wing factions collaborated with the Nazis in order to suppress the Communists. Files were kept on Communists well into the post-war period, and the fault lines spread down the generations,” she explains.
It’s the tale of an ordinary woman leading an extraordinary life. “The central character is a female communist – with a small ‘c’ – named Themis, who is imprisoned on a succession of islands but who never gives up her fight for justice and for love. It was only after I’d picked her name that I discovered that the figure you see on top of the Old Bailey – blindfolded, holding a sword and scales – is also
Themis, so there was this wonderful sense of synchronicity.”
As for Victoria’s own taste of Greece right at home, she tells me, “I’ve started growing olives in our little back garden. Perhaps I’ll press them into oil and put it into those tiny little bottles used for snail serum. Perhaps I’ll sell them at a stall in the farmers’ market on sunny days,” she jokes with a smile. And if she did? I’ve no doubt people would buy them.
Those Who Are Loved is out now, published in hardback by Headline
An interview with Victoria Hislop
Following on from the success of The Island, The Sunrise and Cartes Postales from Greece, Victoria Hislop’s latest novel, Those Who Are Loved, is set against the backdrop of the German occupation of Greece in World War II, the subsequent civil war and military dictatorship. The novel sheds light on the complexity and trauma of Greece’s past and weaves an epic tale of an ordinary woman compelled to live an extraordinary life.
Interview by Alice Beazer for New Books – 100th issue
Congratulations on your amazing new novel; what was the original inspiration for Those Who Are Loved?
The inspiration really was seeing Makronisos from a distance – the island prison – and realising that Greece had its own Alcatraz or its Robben Island. I found that deeply intriguing! And ten years later, here is the novel. It was a big subject to investigate.
Those Who Are Loved begins in 2016, as Themis sits with her grandchildren. The narrative then goes back to Themis’ childhood, and tells the extraordinary tale of her life chronologically. Why did you choose to structure the novel in this way – beginning and ending in the present day (well, almost the present day)?
I have always been drawn to the notion of an older person telling a story to a younger one. Now that I am writing this, I am wondering whether this goes back to our early years when our parents, grandparents, teachers perhaps, read to us. It seems very natural to be told a story by an older person. I have done this in several of my novels. But there is an added layer perhaps – where the life of the older person has contained events or actions which they have wanted to conceal, for reasons of stigma or perhaps fear of persecution.
The powerful bond between grandparents and their grandchildren is a lovely theme in this novel; firstly, with Themis’ warm-hearted grandmother Kyria Koralis, then with Themis’ own grandchildren. Interestingly, Themis feels comfortable to discuss the details of her life with her grandchildren, but not her own children – why did you choose to write this?
I think the revelation of family secrets often takes some years. In a sense this is inevitable. Such things need the distance of time and hindsight, when there can’t be any repercussions perhaps.
Themis is the strong-willed protagonist at the heart of Those Who Are Loved – why did you choose to call her ‘Themis’? And what inspired the character of Themis? Was she based on any real woman?
My character is not based on any one individual but is inspired by all the women who got swept up in the civil war conflict in Greece – for the first time putting on trousers and picking up a gun. It was a very liberating time for women in Greece – they were very much domestic creatures until that time – and indeed they mostly returned to the same domestic position in society afterwards. The use of the name Themis was inspired by two things. Firstly, a wonderful woman I met in Athens, also called Themis, who seemed very forward-thinking, very strong, very inspiring and feminist. Secondly, Themis was the Goddess of Justice – and this is very much the motivation of ‘my’ Themis. She is motivated by a desire for justice and for equality – for the right of everyone to have food to eat and freedom to hold their own political views. This is what drives her to fight rather than a belief in communism per se. A statue of Themis stands on top of the Old Bailey, always shown blindfolded, and holding a pair of scales. She seems as relevant a symbol for our times and for 1940s Greece as she was for the Ancient Greeks.
Whilst Themis is a child, she befriends Fotini, a refugee – I loved reading about their blossoming friendship. I was struck by the clear parallels with the refugee crisis in Greece today. What did you want to show through Fotini’s story?
The influx of refugees into 21st century Greece definitely has some parallels with the wave of refugees that came in almost 100 years ago as a result of the Greek-Turkish War which resulted in the huge population exchange of 1923 (when more than a million Greek Orthodox Christians arrived in Greece from Turkey and hundreds of thousands of Moslems left for Turkey). Fotini’s family is one of those who has been displaced in this way and forms part of the huge number of largely impoverished people who struggled to survive at that time – and who allied themselves with the Left. Many of them lived as well as they could in the rapidly expanding city of Athens – and there are still areas, such as Nea Smyrni (New Smyrna) which reflect where they settled. There are some real differences, however, between refugees arriving in Greece today and those from the 1920’s. One of them is that many have ambitions to return to their home countries and do not regard Greece as a permanent home. For most 21st century refugees, Greece is a place that they are passing through in order to get to countries in northern Europe. In the 1920s the arriving refugees knew that they would never return to their original homes and also they were Greek Orthodox Christians so assimilated more speedily into Greek culture and life. I wasn’t particularly wanting to show anything through Fotini’s story, apart from the fact that social mobility is often denied to people – and poverty is often a hard situation to struggle out of.
(read the full interview at the New Books website)
Interview with Greece Is”
In writing her latest Greece-themed, critically acclaimed book, “Cartes Postales,” a book of stories linked through the voyage of a heartbroken man, Victoria Hislop adopted an experimental approach. Usually gathering a vast body of research notes and reference images and then sitting down to write, a process the author says takes her around three years from idea to completion, this time she wrote mainly while traveling: “The journeys I made for research took me all around the country and the inspiration for different parts of the book came very easily – so I was scribbling a lot of the time as I was actually on the move,” she says.
(Interview with Alexia Amvrazi for Greece Is)
Apart from being a book rich in evocative personal stories set in fascinating Greek locations such as Delphi, Meteora, Andros, Ikaria and Preveza, the book bequeaths the reader with two other pleasures – one is the nostalgia-inducing experience of reading postcards, something people nowadays rarely get to do, and the other is that the texts are punctuated by poignant images which verge from the abstract to the illustrative.
Joining her on this somewhat unorthodox novel-writing adventure was her photographer friend Alexandros Kakolyris, who understood exactly where she was coming from when she came up with the idea for the book. “Children’s books have pictures and a few words. Then there are less and less images, and then there are just words, no more pictures!
“And I thought, why? We live in a world where we’re seeing things all the time, and a lot of the newspapers, magazines as well as non-fiction books have masses of pictures. Why should fiction be any different? So I met the photographer and we talked about how what you see at that moment can actually be the basis of the story.”
Very much like Anthony, the protagonist of the book, who travels from destination to destination without any set purpose, the author’s journey around Greece was not entirely pre-planned: “We didn’t know what to expect, whether each place would deliver something picturesque or interesting to us. At some point we even relied on a weather app to decide where we should go next! But the photographs were very integral to the story I tell, and what I saw and what the photographer saw did affect the course of the book. (read the full interview at Greece-Is)
Authorlink interview with Victoria Hislop
(by Anna Roins for Authorlink)
The Sunday Times best-seller, Cartes Postales from Greece is a new, ground-breaking novel from Victoria Hislop, the internationally acclaimed bestselling author of The Island, The Return, The Thread, and The Sunrise.
Week after week, colourful postcards from Greece arrive at Ellie’s dreary flat in London. They are each signed with the initial, ‘A’. However, with no return address, Ellie cannot forward them on to the rightful owner. Nevertheless, the postcards inspire Ellie to see Greece for herself.
On the morning of her departure, a blue notebook arrives that belongs to ‘A’ whom Ellie discovers is a man who was stood-up by the love of his life at a small airport in the Peloponnese. The journal includes short stories he’s heard along his travels around Greece, reverently illuminated by beautiful photographs, as he nurses his heart back to life.
This latest offering by Victoria Hislop will stay with you a long time after the last page has turned.
AUTHORLINK: Ms Hislop, thank you for talking to us today about Cartes Postale from Greece, which we thoroughly enjoyed. You create a strong sense of place and charming, moreish tales which leave your readers wanting more. We love how Cartes Postale from Greece departs from established precedent and includes vignettes of coloured photographs to accompany each story – some solemn and gripping, others nostalgic and hopeful.
What came first, the photos, depicted as ‘cartes postale’ i.e. postcards (taken by the talented photographer, Alexandros Kakolyris), or the stories?
HISLOP: They were developed together. I travelled with the photographer so that he was there at the moment of inspiration for each story. This is why the photographs are unusual, I think. It would have been very artificial to send a photographer off to find illustrations to match my stories once I had written them – and in many cases it would have been impossible. The photos and stories were simultaneously inspired.
AUTHORLINK: Lovely. Writing letters on paper stationery is a dying art nowadays. It’s the same with postcards, which are even more redundant, given the advent of cameras in mobile phones and Instagram. Yet, cartes postale are still available in every souvenir shop in Greece. Do you prefer paper photos or e-photos? Likewise, paper books or e-books? Or both?
HISLOP: It’s so easy and simple for all of us to take photos on our phones – and I do it all the time, almost to keep a diary of life (though I still write a paper diary of course). But when there is a special photo, or something I want to frame, of course I will print something out. I prefer paper books – because they can be shared, they have covers, you can make notes in them – they are with you for life. Though I do download books too (great for travelling – how else do you carry fifty books in your hand luggage). If I like a book that I have downloaded – I always buy the paper copy after.
(read the full interview at Authorlink)
