One Woman's Struggle - Nasrin Parvaz discusses oppression, survival and the strength of women

by Catriona Troth

Many Prisoners in One Room by Nasrin Parvaz

In 1979, Nasrin Parvaz returned from England, where she had been studying, and became a member of a socialist party in Iran fighting for a non-Islamic state in which women had the same rights as men. Three years later, at the age of 23, she was betrayed by a comrade and arrested by the regime’s secret police.

Nasrin spent the next eight years in Iran’s prison system. She was systematically tortured, threatened with execution, starved and forced to live in appalling, horribly overcrowded conditions. One Woman’s Struggle in Iran is both an account of what happened to her during those eight years, and evidence that her spirit was never broken.

In 1990 she was released and in 1993 she fled to England, where she has been a client of Freedom From Torture. She has given talks on the violation of human rights in Iran, both in Farsi and in English, in a number of countries. She has spoken at Southbank Centre (2015 and 2016), Bare Lit Festival (2016 and 2017), and for organizations such as Amnesty International, Cambridge PEN and Freedom From Torture.

Nasrin’s prison memoir was published in Farsi in 2002, and in Italian in 2006. The English edition has now been published by Victorina Press. Her novel, The Secret Letters from X to A, is also published by Victorina.

Here Nasrin talks to Catriona Troth about her hopes for her memoir, for Iran and for women the world over.

Prison by Nasrin Parvaz

When you started writing One Woman’s Struggle, did you imagine it would be published one day, or was it initially something you did for yourself, as part of the healing process?

I started writing it to publish it. Publishing was my only aim as my prime aim was to communicate. My personal experience is not just personal but is part of the universal history of oppression and struggle.


How did Freedom from Torture and the Write to Life group help you?

I received therapy from FFT for a few years and my therapist was really kind and helpful. She helped me in other areas of life, as well as in the therapy room. For example, I wanted to study psychology and she helped me to find a bursary, so I only had to pay half the price of the course. Things like this that I wasn’t aware of!

When Sonja Linden started the Write to Life group, I was one of her first clients and I must say, if it wasn’t for Sonja, and later on, Hubert Moore who was my mentor, I might have not continued writing! English was not my first language and I was trying to learn it by exchanging one-to-one lessons with people who wanted to learn Farsi.

The Write to Life group helped me in many different ways – including learning how to put my prison experience into words and how to write a story.

Your memoir has already been published in Farsi. Why is it important for you that it is being published in English as well?

Actually I first started to write it in English, but half way into it I realised it wasn’t good enough, so I began to write it in Farsi. I want to tell the world what is happening in Iran and to tell them that the government is carrying out crimes such as imprisoning and executing people for what they believe in – or what they don’t believe in.

Because of my personal experience when I started to write my book, I could only see that torture and execution were happening in Iran; but now I can see that this is happening everywhere. Some might say it’s not happening in western countries, then I’ll tell them that I see it whenever I walk down the road. Yes, the homeless people living in the streets of London and other cities of the world are subject to physical and mental torture. I no longer see that torture - as a means of crushing people - is something that happens only in prison, but as something that is part of the world’s system. Witnessing something so dehumanising is psychological torture for passers-by: it is for me. Every time I see a homeless person, the same feelings of frustration and helplessness I experienced in prison when I was being tortured or my cellmates were being beaten come over me and I feel depressed. 

 

As much as the book is an indictment of oppression, it is a celebration of the strength of women and women’s friendship. How do you think that spirit survives when everything in the system is designed to crush it?

The strength of women and our friendship was one of the ways in which prisoners put up resistance to that system. The Iranian women’s resistance started in 1979, when only a few days after Khomeini arrived in Iran, he announced women should wear the chador – which is like a burqa, except that the woman’s face is uncovered. The next day, on the 8th of March women poured into the streets of Tehran and many other towns. It’s true that the regime eventually forced women to cover their hair; but it took three years till they made it a law and they couldn’t put women into sacks; head scarves became compulsory and nowadays, women are arrested if they don’t observe this law.

Unfortunately so many men have not supported women’s struggle against this sexual apartheid and actively benefit from it.

You've also written a novel based on your experiences - The Secret Letters from X to A. Can you tell us a bit about it?

In Tehran there is a historic circular building once known as the Joint Committee Interrogation Centre. Its designers were German, so the balcony railings were decorated with Nazi symbols. Reza Shah ordered it in 1932 and it was ready in 1937. Political prisoners were tortured there. The Islamic Republic renamed it Towhid and started using it to crush the revolution of young generation who upon toppling the Shah were enjoying freedom of expression. Closed down in 2000, Towhid opened again in 2003 with a new identity: the Ebrat Museum of Iran, exhibiting displays of torture that the Islamic regime says were committed only under the Shah’s regime, and never under their own. I spent six months of my eight years' imprisonment in the interrogation centre that is now known as the Ebrat Museum. ‘Ebrat’ means ‘warning’. Children are frequently taken there on school trips.

The Secret Letters from X to A tells the story of Faraz, a young man who accepts a summer job converting one of Tehran’s prisons into a museum of the repressive rule of the Shah. He understands too late that this will mean destroying all evidence that the present regime, the Islamic Republic of Iran, has tortured and executed prisoners in this same building. Then he discovers a series of secret notebooks written by Xavar, a pregnant young woman who was interned there in 1984.

  

You can read chapter one of the Secret Letters from X to A:
https://www.victorinapress.com/the-secret-letters-from-x-to-a-chapter-1/

Why did you decide to turn your experiences into fiction, and how did it differ from writing the memoir?
I started to write about twenty years ago and my aim was to share my prison experience with people, as an act of struggling against the Islamic regime and to stop execution, torture and prison. At the time I was attending Write to Life workshops. During those workshops I wrote pieces which were not related to my own life or prison experiences. After a while I realised I had two piles of writing: one was related to my prison experience and the other pile was based on other people's life. So I worked on the second pile to make fictional stories and novels. Some of my short stories are publishes, and I have other novels to finish.

In writing fiction I could use my imagination freely and I enjoyed it, but writing my prison memoir was painful!

How optimistic are you for the future of Iran, and particularly for the role of women in the country?

I can’t separate Iran from the rest of the world. We all are in the same boat that is running fast with the current towards a future full of more misery, unless we do something about it. In Iran – the same as in the rest of the world - we need a just system that safeguards freedom and equality.

Regarding the women of Iran, I must say that they haven’t given up their struggle for freedom and equality with men. Since marriage gives all the rights such as divorce and custody to men, for many years it has been common practice for some women to ask their husbands to sign papers giving both parties equal rights. Many of the new generation don’t even bother with marriage and simply live together, even though this is illegal.

What is the most important message you would like people to derive from the book?

That we need to struggle for a just world: a world without torture and execution.

Thank you, Nasrin. I hope many people will support your book. It deserves to be widely read.

You can read Catriona Troth's review of  One Woman's Struggle in Iran  on BookMuseUK.

Dark Chapter: An Interview with author Winnie M Li

Winnie M Li's Dark Chapter is a remarkable book - a fictionalised account of her own brutal rape that explores not only the victim's trauma and recovery, but delves deep into the mind of the perpertrator too. Here she talks to Catriona Troth about the genesis of the novel and her own journey to recovery.

To begin somewhere slightly ‘off centre’, I was fascinated to read that you did your dissertation on Dervla Murphy. I read her Tales from Two Cities, about her experiences in Bradford and Birmingham in the early 1980s, when I was researching my own novel. She is a remarkable woman – an independent spirit to say the least! Can you tell us a bit about what drew you to her

So I’ve always been intrigued by travel, even before I was old enough to really travel on my own. I studied for an MA in English at University College Cork in Ireland, 2000-2001, and the focus of the course was Gender and Sexuality in Irish Writing. Most work by Irish women authors seemed largely to explore stories of repressed daughters and housewives in the Irish countryside — and I found this kind of depressing and difficult to relate to. So my professor (the excellent Pat Coughlan) suggested Dervla Murphy to me. Here was an Irish woman who in 1963 decided to cycle from France to Afghanistan entirely on her own. Now that sense of adventure — that desire to explore the world and embrace uncertainty was something I could definitely connect with. I was in heaven reading her travel writing — and the dissertation was actually a joy to write.

You have written very openly about the fact that you were raped in Belfast in 2008. What happens to Vivian in the book follows almost step by step what happened to you in real life. Why did you chose to write about your experience as fiction, and yet on the other hand to stick so closely to the actual events, rather than allow yourself a bit of creative distance?

I get asked a lot why I decided to write this book as fiction and not as memoir. There’s a few reasons for that. One is that there are already a number of excellent ‘rape memoirs’ out there, which were a great help to me in the year immediately after my assault (After Silence by Nancy Venable Raine and Lucky by Alice Sebold come to mind). I didn’t think I’d be contributing anything new to the field if I just wrote another rape memoir. So what I really wanted to do was explore the character of a young perpetrator, writing his perspective, and intertwine that story with the that of the victim. And that was something I could only do in fiction, since my real-life rapist was a complete stranger to me. Writing Johnny’s perspective was quite a creative leap, so I felt if Vivian’s experience closely echoed my own, that would at least ground the project a bit for me. In other words, Vivian’s sections wouldn’t require such a stretch of the imagination and could offer a bit of creative ‘rest.’


So as you say, Dark Chapter is written from two alternating perspectives. As well as walking us in Vivian’s steps, you delve deep into the mind of her attacker – the last place one would imagine you would want to go. Why was it important for you that you included Johnny’s perspective?

Yes, it would be an entirely different book without Johnny’s perspective, and probably a book that would have held much less interest for me to write. By writing Johnny in an empathetic way, I was trying to push the boundaries of what I felt capable of thinking and feeling as both a writer and a survivor. I also feel that we as a society need to start thinking of perpetrators as human beings whose experiences, upbringings, personalities, etc somehow lead to sexually violent behaviour — they are not born ‘monsters.’ If we’re not willing to understand the contributing factors that lead to perpetrators’ behaviour, we’re never going to be able to prevent this crime from happening in the future.

 

It must have been a very different, but equally painful process to delve back into your own experience. How did you deal with that as a writer, and how did you deal with it personally?

Writing Vivian’s sections was a very different process, but being able to switch back and forth between writing Vivian and Johnny kept things interesting, less monotonous, and less painful for me as a writer. Yes, it was difficult emotionally for me to relive some of the worst episodes in my life, which I had to do in writing Vivian’s trauma, PTSD, and depression. As a writer, using the close-third perspective offered a bit of distance, and this made it possible to look back on my own lived trauma and try to re-frame it as fiction. I also experimented to see how the language could best reflect the sense of isolation and fragmentation that Vivian undergoes at certain moments. Personally, I guess I cried a lot when writing some of these sections! But there was also a slight sense of power gained because I could tell myself: ‘Look, I went through that, but it’s over now. And now I can gain mastery over that experience by transforming it into fiction.’


I believe you wrote the first few paragraphs which were to grow into Dark Chapter just a few weeks after the attack. A few years later, this became an essay published in a book called Sushi and Tapas: Stories By and Of Young Women, for the charity Women for Women International. What prompted those first attempts to put things in writing? How did that differ from writing the novel?

Actually the essay in Sushi and Tapas was entirely different writing from Dark Chapter. That was written as short-form memoir, in first-person, present tense. So it was entirely open and up-front about my experience as lived truth, as reality. It’s true: the prologue of Dark Chapter was written just a few weeks after my attack, and that sparked the idea for the book (the intertwining perspectives of victim and perpetrator). Even though I knew I would have to wait years before I was ready to write this book. Writing for me has always been my way of making sense of the world — I’ve been writing since the age of 6. So it’s impossible for me to not write about things, especially something as momentous as my own rape. But still, the Sushi and Tapas essay was much more direct in portraying my own experience. It didn’t require any research. As fiction, Dark Chapter is significantly more crafted; I had to think a lot about creating character, plot, tension. I experimented with language, I researched heavily. That’s why it took two years to write!


In 2014, you returned to Belfast for the first time since the trial to begin the research for Dark Chapter. What was it like for you to go back? Have you been able to make some peace with the city?

At first, I was terrified at the thought of returning to Belfast. I associated it so closely to my trauma that hearing a Belfast accent would make me nauseous. But I also knew I couldn’t write the novel effectively if I didn’t go back to do that research. So even though I dreaded it, I forced myself to go back. I found that the people of Belfast whom I interviewed were incredibly kind and generous, and bit by bit, I was able to overlay those traumatic memories of the city with much warmer, friendlier ones. Now, I feel perfectly comfortable returning to Belfast and having made a lot of friends there, I even consider it sort of a secondary home.


Your own attacker pleaded guilty, which at least spared you the trauma of examination and cross-examination in public court. But as part of your research you attended trials where this was not the case. What did you learn about the way victims (‘complainants’, in the court jargon) are treated? And how would you like to see that change?

The court procedure really does not value the well-being of victims, and the main argument of the defence is to completely undermine the credibility of the victim’s story. This is incredibly insulting and damaging to a victim, and does not help with recovery. In addition, the prospect of testifying in public, in front of one’s own perpetrator is horrifying. This fear can be very disruptive to rebuilding a victim’s life. In the ideal world, victims would not have to face their perpetrators in court, there would be counselling support available for victims as they go through the criminal justice process, and the whole style of cross-examination would be handled differently. I’m also not a fan of trial by jury with these kinds of crimes, as I think the public harbours some very problematic misperceptions of how a victim should talk, behave, or even look in the case of rape. None of this is actually relevant as to whether or not a perpetrator committed the crime or not, and yet the victim is often judged. 

You clearly believe in the importance of art and creativity as a way of talking about rape and removing the stigma around you. A few years ago you co-founded the Clear Lines Festival aimed to “create a space in which to talk about rape and sexual assault.” Can you tell us some more about that?

I actually started Clear Lines when I was in the middle of writing Dark Chapter. I was feeling very lonely and isolated during all that writing, and I wanted to do something that could maybe combat that isolation and bring together all these artists, writers, activists, and survivors on the issue of sexual assault. I had started to realise how much art was being created to challenge this topic, and how many people out there wanted to engage with that art and not feel as alone. So if I could create some kind of platform or space for artists and audiences to come together, then that could be a positive, healing step in the right direction. It would also allow us to celebrate the value of creativity and community in addressing this issue.


I believe you now consider yourself a survivor, as opposed to a victim. You have even written, “the experience contains the potential for regrowth and recovery, the way a broken bone mends itself to become even stronger” – a remarkable and inspiring statement. If you could speak to the young Vivian now – perhaps the one sleeping on the floor by that window overlooking the Thames because she cannot cope with being shut inside her bedroom – what would you say to her?

It gets better. You won’t always be trapped by the trauma. You’ll be able to travel again, to live again, to enjoy the world again — and one day, you’re going to publish a book about this.

And is there anything you would say to Johnny, if you thought he was ready to listen?

Don’t be so mean to people. Stop and consider their perspectives. Because people are willing to consider yours.

Thank you, Winnie! We wish you every success with the book.

Winnie M Li is an author and activist. Her debut novel, DARK CHAPTER, was published June 1st by Legend Press and will be translated into seven languages. It is currently shortlisted for The Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize, and was 2nd place in the SI Leeds Literary Prize 2016 and Highly Commended for the CWA Debut Dagger 2015. A Harvard graduate, Winnie previously wrote for travel guide books, produced independent feature films, and programmed for film festivals. After earning an MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, she now writes across a range of media, runs arts festivals, and is a PhD researcher in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. She lives in London yet is somewhat addicted to travel. http://winniemli.com Twitter: @winniemli

You can read Catriona Troth's review of Dark Chapter on BookMuse UK. 

Twenty-four Stories for Grenfell Tower

By Catriona Troth

On the night of Friday 24th June, I was watching The Last Leg with my family when Kathy Burke came on to talk about a remarkable project - an invitation to submit a short story for an anthology to raise money for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire. In particular, the project aimed to provide ongoing psychological support to survivors suffering from PTSD.

That night, I contacted the project, and I have been lucky enough to be granted an interview with its two founders, Paul and Rho.

There can scarcely be anyone in the country unaware of the appalling tragedy that has unfolded at Grenfell Tower, and the history of neglect and negligence behind it. So I don’t need to ask why you are doing this. But how did you two get involved personally?

PAUL: Rho and I are friends on Twitter. We were just chatting by DM about Grenfell. Rho was really keen on wanting to do something specifically for the PTSD care of those people affected by it - I know a couple of writers, I contacted them to see if anyone would be interested in putting together a collection of short stories. Next thing we were snowballed by offers of support. From a private chat between a couple of nobodies on Twitter to being mentioned on national television took 72 hours.

Why the idea of a short story anthology?

PAUL: I just liked the idea of something that would instantly remind people of the cause we were raising money for. Short stories seemed an obvious and striking metaphor for the tragedy - that the form would reflect the lives cut short. Also we thought that it offered the best option for writing that wasn't explicitly political, that just by putting this together it would speak for itself in terms of addressing some of the issues that led to this disaster.

Why choose to focus specifically on the issue of PTSD among survivors? And what kind of help do you hope that this will enable?

RHO: Suffering from PTSD and having been in treatment for several years now I immediately knew that survivors and all those directly involved with the rescue operation would be traumatised beyond anything any of us wish to imagine.

As someone who has been treated by leading doctors in the field of PTSD treatment I know just how incredibly effective treatments including EMDR and Sensori-motor Therapy are.

I don’t want this to be another case of cutting corners for the sake of saving money, where people end up having a short course of CBT and medication to smother things; trauma eventually rises to the surface better recognised and helped now than years down the line.

We hope our project and funds raised will make the public more informed about PTSD. We hope the proceeds will in some way help bolster funds to enable survivors to receive the expert psychiatric support they need.


Who can submit stories for the anthology? And what kind of stories are you looking for?

PAUL: Anyone. As long as they're positive, optimistic tales on the themes of community, unity and hope.We want this collection to be a platform for new voices as much as anything else. One of the many issues that Grenfell has illuminated is the great social divide that stretches way beyond Kensington and Chelsea. We want this book to reach out to, and be written by, a true reflection of our community.


What can often be overlooked in these situations are the voices of those most closely affected. Will you be encouraging people from North Kensington and similar communities (such as those now being evacuated from other tower blocks at risk) to submit their stories?

PAUL: Definitely. We're really keen to hear their stories. We've held off contacting community groups in the area for now for obvious reasons but will definitely be working to ensure stories from Grenfell and other affected communities are heard and read.

Following the fantastic response to Kathy Burke’s appearance on The Last Leg, where she talked about Twenty-four Stories, it doesn’t sound as if you will be short of entries! How will the selection process work?

PAUL: It's been an astonishing response. Kathy is going to be part of our editorial team, we've got a duty to identify those as yet undiscovered writers who we think will leave a lasting impression on the reader. We've had dozens of submissions already and have some really exciting big names who have pledged work.

Thank you very much, Paul and Rho. We wish you every success. Can't wait to see the finished anthology!

You can follow Twenty-four Stories on Facebook or on Twitter @Twenty4stories. Look out for an announcement very soon about some big names who have pledged stories for the anthology!

If you would like to submit a story, here's how:

Short story 750-3000 words max OR flash fiction OR fiction based poem.
Themes: Positivity/Unity/Community/Hope.
Deadline: 31/07/17
Submit by email to: twenty4stories@gmail.com

It is very important that you understand how flashbacks and triggers work for PTSD sufferers.

Please read this before submitting a story. http://www.ptsduk.org/what-is-ptsd/understanding-ptsd-flashbacks-and-triggers/

The Jhalak Prize 2017

AND THE WINNER IS: 

JACOB ROSS FOR THE BONE READERS

by Catriona Troth

On Friday 17th March, the winner of the inaugural Jhalak Prize for books written by British BAME authors was announced from a shortlist of six. Fiction and non-fiction, books for adults and books for children: all have been represented on the shortlist and I can’t begin to imagine how the judges are going to pick the final winner.

I’ve spent the last couple of months reading all the books on the Jhalak short and long lists and reviewing them for Book Muse UK. It has been an absolute joy - every one of the books a voyage of discovery. You can read extracts from my reviews below but first, here are some comments from four of the panel of judges: chair of the judging panel, Sunny Singh and her colleagues Musa Okwanga, Yvvette Edwards and Catherine Johnson.

Why were you keen to support the inaugural Jhalak Prize?

Sunny Singh: I founded the Jhalak Prize because I was tired of seeing brilliant writing not receive the attention it deserves, from the press, bookstores, prizes and therefore never getting to readers. And of course I was seeing great writing either not being published or not being published properly. I have been thinking about the prize for about four years now but after the Writing the Future report and various other attempts at raising the issues, we decided go ahead with it. I was at the Polari Prize and got talking to the judges and supporters and realised that a prize may push the issue into consciousness for the various players in the industry. Of course, I am also being selfish: I want to read the writing I love from writers I love. And hopefully Jhalak can help bring them into the market.

Catherine Johnson: The prize came out of BareLit, an incredible crowdfunded festival - I have been a published writer for over twenty years, and it has always been said, if not openly then tacitly that there is not the big audience for books written by BAME authors. This was the first time it was made blatantly clear that there really was a readership and an audience hungry for those stories.

Also, sadly, the 'big' awards in my field - eg The Carnegie, consistently ignore BAME writers - only two have ever been shortlisted in its 80 year history. Here is a chance to give those books air and space and the accolades they deserve. If the mainstream ignore us, why not do it ourselves?

Musa Okwanga: I feel that it is vital that writing of the highest quality gets its due recognition, whoever makes it; and that, so far, too many people of colour do not have the platform that their talents deserve. The Jhalak Prize, in my view, is a wonderfully proactive and progressive way to address that concern.


Just as the Baileys Prize (formerly the Orange Prize) did initially, any literary prize that restricts it potential entrants to a given category of writers tends to attract criticism that entrants are being judged not for their writing but by their gender/colour of skin etc. How do you answer that criticism in the case of the Jhalak Prize?


Sunny Singh: I don't and I won't answer this question! We know the playing field is not level. We have the statistics, the reports, the endless reams of paper but when we flag up the iniquities we are told to 'quit whining and do something.' Well, the Jhalak Prize is us DOING something. You don't like the Jhalak Prize? Then start with working to make that playing field level and actually based on meritocracy!

Catherine Johnson: I think the Bailey's Prize is a good parallel, it may have been contentious at the start but readers understand and accept it as a useful award which draws attention to the best of women's writing. Of course it would be brilliant if we didn't need a prize like this and there was that level playing field we've heard so much about. But there isn't. Society has its flaws. We could either lie down and accept that books by BAME authors are going to be overlooked or do something to draw attention to the fantastic breadth and depth of writing out there.

Musa Okwanga: I would say that this form of criticism of the Jhalak Prize is a little like criticising a doctor for diagnosing and providing medicine for an ailment, rather than criticising the causes of the ailment itself. Because I think that the lack of diversity in publishing at the moment is an ailment, and one which is depriving us all of some of the most exciting writing out there. So let’s do what we can to cure that.

Yvvette Edwards: There are many literary prizes. There are prizes that restrict submissions to writers from a particular part of the country, ones that only judge debuts or second novels or crime or romance or science fiction, or writers of a particular age or religion or gender, or any of a hundred other criteria. It is not a matter of discrimination why this is so, but an effort to ensure that writers who are unlikely to be put forward to or nominated for the big literary prizes, yet are nonetheless producing great writing - sometimes very progressive, experimental and original writing that deserves a wider audience - that those writers are acknowledged and the quality of their work is recognised. In the case of the Jhalak Prize, there’s nothing ominous about it; it’s simply another literary prize with a submission criterion.


It must be particularly challenging to judge a prize that encompasses non-fiction, adult fiction and young adult fiction and fiction for children. How have you approached making those sorts of comparisons?

Sunny Singh: As chair of judging panel, my role has been mostly to hear out what the panel has says. I think we were clear that books were judged within the category they fell. So YA was seen as amazing within that particular category. Nonfiction the same. And the rest. We got particularly lucky as so many of the books also transcended their particular tag. The shortlist is utterly extraordinary.

Catherine Johnson: I think this is one of the strengths of the prize. Isn't it marvellous to say Children's and YA are just as important as non fiction and literary fiction? Our prize is about readers just as much as writers, about saying to readers how wonderful and rich and varied the work that BAME writers are producing.

Musa Okwanga: The only true challenges have been the creation of a longlist, and then a shortlist - to say nothing of selecting the eventual winner. When judging work, I think that we have all tried to look for originality, for creativity - it will sound like cliche, but we have looked for work which has a unique voice. It’s been very difficult to narrow the submissions down, but I am confident that we have managed that.

Yvvette Edwards: The task was made much easier by the fact that we were not required to longlist a specific number of books. The decision was made early on that every book that deserved to be on the longlist would be, which meant that we were able to put forward every book that the judging panel agreed deserved to be nominated, irrespective of whether it was non-fiction or adult, children or YA fiction. Once we were down to the longlist, we had lengthy discussions about the merits of each book, judging them on their own terms and within their genre.


Can you tell us what has particularly excited you about any of the six books on the shortlist?

Sunny Singh: Gosh all of them! Insightful, innovative. One of the judges commented at a meeting that the longlist was made up of great books and the shortlist is all phenomenal ones. It's been a pleasure to read and reread them during the judging process. And one can't say that about many books, forget about all on a shortlist!

Catherine Johnson: Definitely the breadth and depth. Look at those books, every one is a total gem. I have no idea which is the winner, they all deserve the prize.

Musa Okwanga: We all have our own favourites, I am sure, but I have loved the bravery of the work - the fearlessness and empathy shown in tackling the most taboo of subjects. That’s all I feel that I can say publicly, but I will have to drop that particular writer a private message of congratulation at some point.

Yvvette Edwards: I have to say - and I am not attempting to be diplomatic or coy - that all the shortlisted books excite me. Every one of those books deserved its place on the Jhalak Prize shortlist and to be widely read. Although I had a couple of favourites in mind, I approached the final judging panel with an open mind, because any of those books would have been a worthy winner of the inaugural prize.


Finally, what are your hopes for the future of the Jhalak Prize?

Sunny Singh: I started the prize with the hopes of ending it! The prize succeeds when it is no longer needed. So that is all I hope for: that one day, in not too far future, a prize like the Jhalak Prize will not be necessary because it will truly be a 'level playing field.' I guess one can and must dream!

Catherine Johnson: I think the prize has hit the ground running, I hope it will grow and earn a reputation for flagging up brilliance across genres.

Musa Okwanga: That it will continue to flourish and to provide a platform for spectacular writing for as long as it is needed. It has been a pleasure, an honour and a privilege to have helped it on its way.

Yvvette Edwards: I hope it becomes an established fixture in the literary calendar, and that it goes from strength to strength.


Thank you! Look out for the announcement of the winner on the evening of Friday 17th March 2017.
Now here are my reviews of the six shortlisted books. 

Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge

A day chosen at random – unremarkable in any way, including for the number of young people to die of gunshot wounds in a 24 hour period. On this day, seven of those killed were black, two Hispanic and one white. The oldest was nineteen; the youngest nine. “The truth is it’s happening every day, only most do not see it.”

Each chapter is both a personal account of a young person whose life and death would otherwise have passed unremarked by anyone outside their immediate neighbourhood, and an essay on the factors that create this appalling death rate.

Segregation also creates a numbing distance across which empathy becomes all-but impossible. This book may be one strut in a bridge across that divide.

Genre: Non-Fiction

Read my full review here.

Speak Gigantular by Irenosen Okojie

Following on from her Betty Trask winning debut novel, Butterfly Fish, Speak Gigantular is Irenosen Okojie’s first collection of short stories. And it is almost certainly not like any other short story collection you have ever read. Okojie’s writing rarely stays long in the recognisable world of the five senses. In these stories, emotions take on physical form.

These are unsettling stories. Reading them is like walking through one of those trick rooms whose crooked walls make you think the floor is unstable. Okojie’s range is formidable and her imagination extraordinary.

Genre: Short Stories

Read my full review here.

The Bone Readers by Jacob Ross

Two cold cases twist and turn through the pages of The Bone Readers. Michael ‘Digger’ Digson needs to find the truth behind the death of his mother, killed when he was a young boy. And his boss, Detective Superintendent Chilman, is obsessed with the case of Nathan, a young man who disappeared and whose mother is convinced he was murdered.

Written by Granadan born Jacob Ross, The Bone Readers is set on a tiny, fictional Caribbean island. The multiple strands of the book all play on themes of sexual violence, sexual exploitation, gender power struggles and corruption. The women in the book are tough, shrewd, emotionally intelligent and sassy. Yet they are trapped by male prejudice, male violence and the male stranglehold on power. Many carry scars from the sexual violence they have experienced.

An unconventional crime novel, and one that exposes the dark underbelly of ‘paradise.’

Genre: Crime Fiction

Read my full review here.

The Girl of Ink and Stars by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Ink and stars - the two most fundamental tools of the cartographer.

Isa is the daughter of a cartographer, and his unofficial apprentice. But Isa’s Da no longer roams the world to map its continents, but walks heavily supported by a stick. And the only guide to the Forbidden Forest is an ancient cloth map left behind by Isa’s mother. So when a girl is found dead in the Governor’s orchard, and his daughter, Isa’s friend Lupe, disappears into the forest, it is up to Isa to don the mantle of cartographer and guide the search party into the heart of the island, where no one has travelled for years.

Maps have a magic about them. They can say as much about the people who made them as they do about the lands they depict. Kiran Millwood Hargrave has spun that magic into a tale of adventure that is – as all good heroic journeys should be - about friendship and courage, self discovery and self sacrifice.

Genre: Fiction for 9-12 year olds.

Read my full review here.

Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga

Written as a companion to the BBC television series of the same name, David Olusoga’s book shows how the Black presence in Britain can be traced back to Roman times and has been a feature of life, particularly in London and other big cities, since Tudor times. It demonstrates how British economic interest, first in the slave trade itself and then in slave-produced cotton, warred for centuries with a mixture of the exalted believe that British air was ‘too pure for slaves to breathe’ and genuine courageous humanitarianism.

Britain may have been one of the first countries to outlaw the slave trade, but in the years before abolition, it was also its biggest player. As Olusoga shows, British involvement in the slave trade began in the early 17th C and gained the Royal seal of approval in 1672. In just the 20 years before the slave trade was outlawed by Act of Parliament in 1807, three quarters of a million slaves were transported from Africa to the Americas aboard British ships.

Britain has things to be proud of in the history of relations with its Black citizens, but much to be ashamed of too. A powerful, emotional and eye-opening read.

Genre: Non-Fiction

Read my full review here.

A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee

Calcutta in 1919.The “Quit India” movement is beginning to gain momentum. Calls for violent uprising clash with Gandhi’s approach of non-violent noncooperation. And the British were doubling down on their control with an oppressive set of laws called the Rowlatt Acts. In the midst of this, a senior British civil servant is found murdered in the ‘wrong’ part of town, with piece of paper stuffed in his mouth inscribed with a subversive slogan.

Mukherjee takes you down into the streets of Calcutta, from the stinking gullees of Black Town and the opium dens of Tiretta Bazaar, to the poky guesthouses for the itinerant British, where “the mores of Bengal were exported to the heat of Bengal,” the maroon-painted colonial neo-classic buildings of the Imperial civil service and the exclusive clubs of the rich, mini Blenheim Palaces, sporting signs that declare ‘No dogs or Indians beyond this point.’

Genre: Crime Fiction, Historical Fiction

Read my full review here.

And my own personal favourite? One that only made it to the longlist, the haunting novel Augustown by Kei Miller.

Augustown by Kei Miller

Augustown is a poor suburb of Kingston, Jamaica, set up by the slaves set free by royal decree on 1st August 1838. It is also closely associated with Alexander Bedward, the preacher who inspired Bedwardism, the roots from which grew Rastafarianism.

Kei Miller’s novel takes place largely in 1982, when most of those who remember Bedward are dead or dying and the events of his life have become tales told by grandmothers like Ma Taffy. And on the day that Ma Taffy sits up straight on her verandah and smells something high and ripe in the air, she knows an autoclapse is coming. ( Autoclapse: (Noun) Jamaican Dialect. An impending disaster; Calamity; Trouble on top of trouble.)

A stunning novel that takes modern Jamaican history (and the history of Rastafarianism in particular) and spins from it a fable the might stand for any people suffering from ingrained economic disadvantage and religious intolerance.

Genre: Literary Fiction

Read my full review here.



Finally, a couple of 'special mentions' from Yvvette Edwards of books that did not make the longlist:

"One of the books that excited me was Hibo Wardere’s incredibly brave memoir, Cut: One Woman’s fight against FGM in Britain Today, which was a harrowing yet life-affirming read. Another personal favourite of mine was a children’s book, The No1 Car Spotter Fights the Factory, by Atinuke. Aimed at 6 to 9 year olds, it was a social commentary on the positive power of social media and the capacity of the community to affect change, whilst exploring the reality of the lives of the poor in third world countries and the ways in which they are exploited by large corporations. At the same time, it was a genuinely enjoyable and accessible read."

Writing Fiction in a Second Language - an interview with Helena Halme

Writing fiction is hard enough for those of us for whom English is a first language. How on earth to authors manage it when English is their second - or even third or fourth - language? We talk to Finnish author Helena Halme.

Helena Halme in Helsinki

You were born and brought up in Finland and Sweden but have lived in London a long time now - so you are trilingual. What was the first language you remember writing a story in?

I wrote my first story at school in Finland, so it was in Finnish. But over in Scandinavia we place a huge emphasis on learning other languages, so quite early on we wrote essays and stories in English, Swedish, French and German too. The first ‘serious’ stories I wrote were in English after I’d moved to Britain.

Did you speak English before you came to live here? Was it a tough language to learn? What was it like coming to grips with colloquial English?

I began learning English at the age of seven, and through popular culture (mainly TV in those days), I was exposed to a lot of English well before I moved here. All the same, I didn’t really learn the language completely until I worked at the BBC as journalist/translator. The learning curve was fairly steep there because I worked in news reporting and often had to produce content at a very short notice.

Apart from the obvious commercial reason of the size of your potential readership - why choose to write your novels in English?

This is a question I’ve been asked so many times, that if I had a penny for every occasion, I’d be a rich woman by now! But of course I understand why readers and other writers ask this, because it is quite unusual to abandon your native tongue. But to me it was a natural progression.

When I moved to the UK at the age of 22, as a newly married Navy Wife with a husband who was away at sea more than at home with me, I was very lonely. To keep myself busy (and sane!), I began writing a diary in Finnish, but soon found it hard to describe some of what was happening to me in my native language. So I flipped the diary over and began writing in English on the other side, a little like Anna Wulf did in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (which is one of my favourite novels). Soon the English side took over and I haven’t looked back since.

Tampere

Have you ever, as an adult, written stories in Finnish? Have you any plans to do so? Do you think you would be telling a different kind of story if you were writing in Finnish?

To me writing in English seems the most natural thing to do, but I have recently been thinking about writing a novel in Finnish. I do think the stories would be different, because the language is so close to my heart and touches me on a different emotional level. I once joked with a fellow Finnish author, who also writes in English, that if I had to write in Finnish I’d be weeping the whole of the time. But it would be a wonderful challenge, and I may well do it one day.

When you begin to imagine the stories in your head, which language are you thinking in? Or (like my mother, who is Welsh/English bilingual) does that question simply not make sense to you?

Actually that question absolutely makes sense to me. For a writer the language is a tool, which you need to keep sharpened at all times. I think in English when I write and when I imagine scenes. I often find myself talking to myself (in English) when I’m walking my little terrier. I’m certain my fellow dog walkers think I’m completely barking (as it were!) But when I’ve been visiting Finland, or I have family or friends over here, it takes me a little while to get back to writing in English again. It’s sad, but nowadays I have to limit my reading in any other languages too. This, I think, is one of the main reasons I may be a little afraid of going back to Finnish – what if I’m never be able to switch back again?

What do you think are the greatest challenges of writing in a language that is not your native tongue?

I see writing in English as a foreign language a huge opportunity. I’ve been told that I have a unique voice, something which I’m incredibly grateful for, and which I believe is due to my Finnish/Swedish upbringing. But of course there are challenges too. Sometimes I can’t see what the correct preposition should be, or I get popular expressions or proverbs wrong. But writing in another language also makes you incredibly conscious of possible mistakes, so I tend to be very careful about grammar, spelling and so on. Naturally, I use professional editors and proofreaders to correct my work, as any published writer should.

Are there things from your Finnish background that you find hard to express in English? Can you give us some examples?

In a way, explaining Finnish – and Nordic – culture is my trade. All my books are set partly in Finland or Sweden, and all of my five novels deal with displacement and the differences in Nordic and British daily life. So no, I don’t find explaining Finnish culture difficult at all. I revel in explaining how Nordic homes are so well heated and insulated that you have to wear t-shirts and shorts inside while the temperatures hit -20C outside; or how Finns don’t do small talk, and say what they mean. I absolutely love explaining these little, but significant, differences between our countries!

Finally, can you tell us what you are working on at the moment?

My current project is the fifth book in The Englishman series. The first novel in the series was born on my blog some ten years ago, when I started telling the story of how I met and married my British Navy Officer husband. The resulting novel is a fictionalised account of my early life in the UK, and the series has developed further and veered quite heavily away from my own life. Book 5 hasn’t got a title as yet, but privately I’m calling it ‘The Baby Book’. Make of that what you will!

Helena Halme is the author of The Englishman, a best-selling Nordic romance, which won an Awesome Indies badge on publication. The tumultuous 1980s love story between a Finnish girl and a British Navy officer is now a series of four books, including a prequel novella, The Finnish Girl, the sequel The Navy Wife, and Helena’s latest title, The Good Officer, book four in the series.

Helena grew up in Tampere, central Finland, and moved to the UK via Stockholm and Helsinki. She is the winner of the John Nurmi prize for best thesis on British politics, a former BBC journalist, and has also worked as a magazine editor and a bookseller and, until recently, ran a Finnish/British cultural association in London. Her articles have been published in the CoScan Magazine, The ScanMag and the Finn-Guild Magazine.

After gaining an MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, Helena began to take writing seriously, and is currently working on the fifth book in The Englishman series. She has recently been appointed Nordic Ambassador for The Alliance of Independent Authors. Helena lives in North London with her ex-Navy husband and an old stubborn terrier, called Jerry. She loves Nordic Noir and sings along to Abba songs when no one is around.

You can find her at www.helenahalme.com, and follow her on Twitter,  Facebook or Instagram.

My Publishing Journey .... with Chris Curran

By Gillian Hamer

Chris Curran has written two psychological crime novels for Harper Collins Killer Reads. She left school at sixteen to work in the local library, returning to full-time education after studying for ‘A’ levels at evening classes. She was born in London, but at university in Brighton she fell in love with the south coast. She eventually persuaded her husband and family to move to Hastings where she is a proud shareholder of the recently reopened pier. Amongst other things she has worked as a primary school teacher, an actress and an editor.

Her first book, Mindsight, a psychological thriller set in Hastings was published last year. And her second novel, Her Turn To Cry, came out as an e-book on July 8^th and publishes in paperback on September 8^th.

In the second in our series where we investigate author's personal publishing journey from first scribbles to published novels, Chris gives us an insight into the highs and lows of her career.

What was the first short story or novel you wrote?

When I was a teenager I was obsessed by tragic women from history, particularly those who died young. So my first attempt at a novel was about Joan of Arc. I never finished it, which is probably for the best. I must have become more cheerful after that because my next two attempts at novels were comedies. I only have fragments to show for the years I spent writing them, but again that’s probably a blessing. My first published fiction was a light-hearted short story about a cheating husband, which appeared in Bella magazine. With my crime novels, I seem to have gone back to the dark side.

Was writing just a hobby to begin with for you?

I’ve always taken my writing seriously so I never considered it a hobby and I had ambitions to be published right from the start. Of course at first that only meant having my work read out in class or put on a school noticeboard! But even then I dreamed of seeing my name on the cover of a real book one day and was determined to make that dream come true.

When did you know you were ‘good’?

I’m not a confident person, however a few short-listings in competitions and some of my stories beginning to be accepted for publication convinced me I must be doing something right. A negative review can still shake my confidence however and of course that’s the one that sticks in my mind. I shouldn’t read them, but the lure is irresistible!

In fact, painful though it is, I have the feeling that it’s good for a writer to be full of doubts. That way you are always striving to improve.

What were your first steps towards publication?

Because I was doing a demanding full-time job, as well as bringing up three children, I started by writing short stories, mainly for women’s magazines. I used the small amount of money I made to fund two Arvon courses. These were incredibly useful not only for the intense writing sessions with the successful writers and publishing professionals tutoring the courses, but for practical advice about getting your work out there. It was also great to meet other students who were in a similar position and to share experiences and ideas. Quite a number of us have now published novels.

Chris's latest release

What has been your proudest writing moment to date?

It was an enormous thrill to see my first story in a magazine. When I opened the letter telling me it had been accepted I ran around the house screaming with excitement and terrifying my husband! One thing that really makes me happy even now is that my mum, who died before my novel was published, was so excited to read that story.

But I was most proud when Mindsight (recently picked as a Sunday Express best summer read) was chosen by such a major publisher as Harper Collins. It was unexpected because I didn’t have an agent and had submitted the novel during an open submission slot imagining I would hear no more about it. When the email from my soon to be editor popped up in my inbox, saying she loved the book and wanted to take it on, I was so surprised that I kept telling myself not to get excited because it was probably all a mistake!

Any mistakes you wish, in hindsight, you had avoided?

Losing faith in my writing at various times and letting it hold me back, although being the person I am I’m not sure I could have avoided that.

What do you know now you wish you’d known at the start of your journey?

That all the ups and downs along the way would feed into my writing and help to make it better.

What top 3 tips would you offer new and up-coming authors hoping to publish? 

• Try to find a group of trusted readers who will give an honest and perceptive opinion of your fledgling work.
• Don’t rush to submit before you are certain the book is the best it can possibly be. Ideally when you think it’s finished you should put it away and try to forget it for a while so that you can reread it with fresh eyes.
• Brace yourself for rejection, but persevere.

Connect with Chris and her books:

Website: https://chriscurranauthor.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Chris-Curran-421251721385764/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel

Twitter: @Christi_Curran

60 Seconds with C.L Taylor

By Gillian Hamer

Tell us a little about you and your writing.

Hello! Thanks so much for having me on your blog. My name is Cally Taylor and I write psychological thrillers under the name C.L. Taylor. I live in Bristol with my partner and young son and I’ve been a published author since 2009, although I’ve been making up stories a lot longer than that!

Like a lot of authors I wanted to write for a living from a very young age. When I was eight I sent a book I’d written and illustrated (and bound with wool) to Ladybird publishers. Three years later I received my first rejection. That book sat on the slush pile for a very long time!
I wrote a lot of terrible poetry in my teens and started and abandoned lots of novels in my early twenties. But it wasn’t until my early thirties that I got serious about writing. I saw a programme on BBC2, asking aspiring authors to finish short stories that had been started by published writers. I chose to finish a short story by Joanne Harris. I didn’t win but I was bitten by the short story bug. I went on to write hundreds of short stories and, over the next couple of years, I was published in dozens of literary and women’s magazines and even won a few competitions. In the summer of 2006 one of my best friends from school died suddenly. Her death made me realise that life is too short to procrastinate where your dreams are involved. I started writing a novel and finished the first draft three months and three weeks later.

It’s a popular genre at the moment, but why did you choose to write psychological thrillers?

I’ve always had a bit of split personality when it comes to writing. Back when I wrote a lot of short stories I alternated between light, funny stories (for the women’s magazines) and darker, grittier stories (for the literary magazines and ezines). In the summer of 2010 the Romantic Novelists’ Association ran a competition. It was for the first 1,000 words of a novel on the theme of ‘keeping a secret’. I was heavily pregnant at the time and, as I was doing my food shopping, the voice of a character popped into my head. She told me that her daughter was in a coma and she’d found an entry in her diary saying ‘keeping this secret is killing me’. I waddled home with my groceries and wrote it down. My thousand words went on to win the competition! I didn’t do anything else with the novel until several months later when I was on maternity leave with my son. He woke me up every couple of hours in the night to nurse and, while I fed him, I thought about the girl in the coma and her mother and a plot appeared in my head. I wrote it over five months, while my son napped during the day.

I write about things that I fear. In The Accident (the book that started life as ‘Girl in a Coma’) I wrote about my fear that an abusive ex might turn up and destroy my happiness. In The Lie I wrote about friends turning against each other. And in The Missing, I wrote about a child going missing.

As well as dark thrillers you also write romantic comedy! Quite a combination, how did that come about? 

I mentioned earlier that I have a bit of a split personality when it comes to writing. The novel that I wrote in three months and three weeks after my friend died was a supernatural romantic comedy called Heaven Can Wait. It was published by Orion along with another romcom called Home for Christmas. I felt compelled to write Heaven Can Wait, it was an idea I’d had in my head for a while and I was desperate to tell it. The book sold to 14 countries and was won several chick lit review website awards. It was enormous fun to write, as was my second romcom (which was turned into a film in 2014 by an independent film company) but I find it much harder to be funny than I do to write tense, page-turning psychological thrillers.

Any other genres you fancy trying one day?

I’d quite like to write a sci-fi novel. And if I did my partner might actually read it!

What would you be doing if you weren’t a full-time writer now?

I had to write four books before I was able to give up the day job. I used to be the manager of a development team in a university distance learning department.

What’s the best thing about being a writer?

Choosing my own hours, the buzz of coming up with a new idea, holding a finished book in my hands. And the very best thing about being a writer is receiving emails from people who tell me that one of my books gave them a new love of reading, kept them entertained when they were ill or helped snap them out of a reading slump.

And the worst? 

Forcing myself to write day after day when I’m tired or fed up or I’d rather sit on the sofa and watch DVD boxed sets or have a nap! Also, horrible reviewers that take great pleasure in being as mean and spiteful as possible (rather than critiquing the book).

Where do you write?

I’m very lucky that, after years writing at a desk in my bedroom, I finally have my own study at home. Well, I say it’s my study but it also doubles up as the guest bedroom. I also share the space with a treadmill (it’s the only cure for writer’s bum!)

Which 3 books would you take to a desert island?

I’d take the Harry Potter boxed set (is that cheating?), After You’d Gone by Maggie O’Farrell and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.

What are your future writing plans?

I am currently writing my fourth psychological thriller (which will be published in April 2017) and the occasional short story. And there’s a top secret project that’s currently with my agent, but I can’t say more about it than that!


www.cltaylorauthor.com

www.facebook.com/CallyTaylorAuthor

www.twitter.com/CallyTaylor

www.instagram.com/CLTaylorAuthor

Living with Etty

by Catriona Troth

Photo courtesy of Ricardo Barros

Etty Hillesum was a Jewish woman from the Netherlands murdered in Auschwitz. Like Anne Frank, she kept a diary which was found and published after her death. But perhaps because Etty is a more morally complex and ambiguous character, it took 38 years before her diary was published, and even now it is hardly known.

A chance discovery at a yard sale brought Etty into the life of actress and writer Susan Stein. And now, through the one-woman play she wrote based on the diaries, Etty has become her life’s work. Between performances during her latest British tour, Stein explained how the play came about, and how it develops as she travels the world, bringing Etty to an astonishing range of audiences.

I began by asking Stein how she first encountered Etty Hillesum, and why she decided to turn her diaries into a play.

“I first heard of the book from a college roommate’s mother who did not recommend books lightly.

She said it had changed her life. Then a few months later, I found a copy at a yard sale in a little town in Maine for 50 cents. It was the abridged version, “An Interrupted life”. It would fit in your pocket.

“At first didn’t like her at all. Etty seemed self involved. She is sleeping with two different men, trying to figure out who she wants to be with. She has this very odd relationship with her therapist.

“But at some point in my reading something shifted. I am not sure when it happened. I have tried to go back and pinpoint it, but I’ve never been able to find it again. But somehow Etty got under my skin.

“It’s as if she were sitting next to me, whispering her life to me. It’s uncomfortable, awkward. And sometimes friendly. Not precious. Sometimes incredibly poetic. Self conscious. All those things. Sometimes I have the feeling I’m not supposed to be reading this. It’s way too intimate. Too naked.

“I had never experienced a book like this. Never felt someone so raw and vulnerable. Yet at this point, I was still reading the abridged version, which was somewhat sanitised. Not quite her at all. She was a little bit turned into ‘Saint Etty.’

“Even so, her sensibility is remarkable. When she gets to the place where she says, “You cannot help us, God. I shall have to help you,” I stopped breathing. Who is this woman? What does she find deep in herself that she comes to that understanding?

“I had read the book jacket, so I knew she didn’t survive. I didn’t want to let go. An intimacy I’d barely experienced with my closest friends. I am the slowest reader I know, but I could feel myself slowing down even more as I neared the end.

“I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t better known. I remember thinking, ‘I know, I’ll make a play, bring it to people and they will want to read the diaries for themselves.’ (Which is still my goal, by the way.) But I didn’t do it straight away. A few years later, I was in a car accident. That night, in the emergency room, the thought came to into my head, ‘I didn’t do that play.’ Where did that come from?

“I’ve worked on it now for eight years. Now it is a full time job, and it is still evolving.”

Photo courtesy of  Ricardo Barros

As a writer, I was fascinated to know how she went about taking someone’s words and turning them into a play.

“I spent over a year, just distilling it. To begin with I thought I could just take the bits I liked. But then I started working with the director, Austin Pendleton. He made me see that it had no dramatic spine. He started giving me assignments to help me shape it.

“He asked me first to outline, not Etty’s life, but the story of the diary itself. Three weeks later I was still struggling with that. Then someone said to me, ‘Are you reading academic work about the Holocaust? You know more than Etty knows, about what’s happening and what will happen. It’s getting in the way.’

“I was very focused on dates. Austin pushed me to abandon chronology. At first I couldn’t do it. I had dates fixed in my head. ‘On July such and such, 1942, she said this!’

“I remember having coffee with a woman writing her Ph.D. on Etty. She encouraged me to ‘let Etty guide me to the script.’ Then I spent some time with Etty's actual diaries in the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam. I saw how her handwriting evolved over time. It helped me move closer to her words, and the words began to take me to a deeper place.

“Another thing Austin asked me was “Where is her shame?”I had to get underneath her words, figure out what she is NOT saying. I didn’t like where that took me.

“I could deal with certain parts of her shame. I knew she was ashamed of how large her breasts were. I imagine her stripped naked at Auschwitz. I worry about how she felt then, in front of all those people.

“But I had to take Etty off a pedestal. I was protecting her. I was struggling with my relationship with her, and I was also struggling as a Jew, especially about her menial work for the Jewish Council. That’s a thorny piece of the play. A thorny piece of history. It’s been one of the most difficult and time consuming parts of the play to get right.

“At one point, I performed Etty at a Quaker Meeting House in Aberystwyth. After that performance, some people were seeing Etty as a collaborator, which shows how easy it is for people to view victims as collaborators. It made me realise I still had a lot of work to do. By choosing to include the Jewish Councils, I had set myself a difficult task of introducing a complicated piece of history into the play, history most audiences were not familiar with. To clarify the Councils, I had put too much focus on them and the play seemed more about the Councils than about Etty and her remarkable sensibility.

“The Nazis were very smart in the way they created the Jewish councils. They put Jews in an untenable situation. Etty is caught in the middle. She refuses to go into hiding and save herself. Yet she accepts a menial role with the Jewish Council, which delays her deportation for several months.

“Where the bind comes, for her, is when her parents and brother get to Westerbork camp. She feels obligated to do everything she can to keep them off the weekly transport to Auschwitz. Yet she knows, if she succeeds in keeping them off the transport, then three other people go in their place. She becomes part of that cat and mouse game.

“Etty is agonized by the privilege her position affords her. But Etty is not corrupt. She is a human being caught in an inhuman situation. When I talk about this to students, I tell them – we are all privileged or we wouldn’t be here today, speaking about this. It’s not wrong to have privilege. Sometimes we earn it; sometimes we just get lucky. So what do we do with that privilege?

“What I have come to realise is that, within 10 days of keeping the diary, something is released in Etty. This is my interpretation, but I believe that force is what she is calling God. I believe that when she gets to Westerbork, she understands that this is the role she has been cast in. She has to be open to it and be present. She wants to ‘pass the test’. I hope she thought she did.

“So the play keeps evolving. It’s like scaffolding – when you move one thing, other things have the change as well. Each stage is different, and I don’t even realise I am in a different stage till I get there.

“The second ‘act’ of the play is now the discussion with the audience. That was something we discouraged at first – we wanted the play to be enough. But people weren’t leaving! Etty starts a conversation. Others want to continue it.”


Stein has performed Etty at an extraordinary range of venues – schools, places of worship, Native American reservations. It’s an intense emotional experience, for Stein as well as for the audience. As a film maker recently described it, ‘It’s as if this woman from 1942 walks into the room, sits down and starts talking to you.’

“I remember, before the first performance, Austin asking me, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ I decided it was someone going to sleep. But Austin said, ‘No, going to sleep is a GOOD option. Let’s make it worse. Let’s have them walk out. One at a time, till you are looking at empty chairs where there had been people. What would you do?’ I said, ‘I’d keep talking.’ And he said, ‘Good. If that happens you will get to the place where Etty was when she started writing.’

“The nearest I came to that happening was in a prison in Scotland. They brought men and women brought together when they don’t normally see each other, so it had failed before it had even started. By the time I got to the prayer, they were all but throwing things. The only reason they didn’t walk out was that they weren’t allowed to. And I kept going. I had the experience of staying with her words when no one else cared.

“Despite that, prison performances are some of the most powerful. And I’ve met the most amazing people. A teacher at Shotts prison near Glasgow. Some severely disabled children at Braidburn school in Edinburgh. Etty has brought us together.

“I had no idea the project would have the life that it’s had. I didn’t know I would travel to all these places. Sometimes I have to ask myself, am I doing this right? It’s never had a theatre run. Never reached the point where it has a momentum of its own. Every day, it’s waking up and calling people, trying to let them know about Etty, finding the next venue to do it.

“But maybe travelling round the world with a suitcase and Etty’s words is the venue for this piece. Taking her to those who wouldn’t normally go to the theatre.

“Etty’s feels like a voice we need for our times. She refused to choose the divisive. She refused to 'tilt towards the savage.’ She found another way. She paid a price for it and was willing to do that. But her words and her spirit still live and inspire.”

To find out more visit about Susan Stein and Etty Hillesum, visit http://ettyplay.org