What inspired you to write Out of the Woods?

When I was a junior lawyer, I went to The Hague to work as an intern at the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia and the thing I never forgot were the testimonies of the incredibly brave people who came to talk about their experiences of the war. The story of the war in popular accounts really had been told mostly from the point of view of the main actors who were overwhelmingly men and were later proven to be war criminals. To me it was the stories of the survivors that was the most powerful thing I heard and in Out of the Woods I tried to reframe the war to privilege their stories. 

What were the most challenging and enlightening aspects of writing your book?

The most challenging aspect of writing Out of the Woods was to write about a war crimes trial without aestheticising the violence depicted in that trial in any way. I felt that violence was really the language of the aggressors and not where I wanted to place the reader’s attention. By using the testimonies of the witnesses in the novel, I was really trying to give the power of speech back to those people who had, incredibly, survived the conflict and found a way to put into words what in many cases was utterly unspeakable. I find that to be an incredibly brave and inspiring act. 

The most enlightening aspect of the book was actually how receptive and encouraging members of the Bosnian community were to this book. Every single Bosnian I spoke to about this book had an incredible resilience and generosity of spirit that I will never forget.  

In what ways do you think the narrator in Out of the Woods might be an empowering figure for women and young girls?

The narrator of Out of the Woods is, as I was, transformed by the testimony she hears in The Hague and by a friendship she has with a Bosnian woman. I think this power of listening and being open to understand other people’s experience are some of life’s most vital experiences. We get very caught up in our own realities and hearing or reading other people’s stories is a crucial way of breaking out of our own egocentricity. 

How do you think literature helps to shape our understanding of ourselves and others?

Wow, that is an immense question that I don’t feel entirely qualified to answer! One thing I think that literature does is to remove experience from the continuum of life, so that we are able to reflect on it and pay attention to it in a way that we are often not able to do in reality because life keeps going. In literature you are able to reach a point of insight that is often unavailable in the wash and tumble of life. Until I wrote, Out of the Woods, for example, I didn’t really understand why the testimonies of people at the war crimes tribunal had such an unforgettable impact on me. 

What was the most recent book you’ve read about women or girls that moved you?

That’s a tough question because most of the books I read are about women. I thought Susie Miller’s Inter Alia was an incredibly intelligent reflection on the causes of sexual violence as being downstream from culture. I also loved Gwendolyn Riley’s The Palm House, who is masterful at depicting both female kindness and cruelty – both equally important to understand. I also found its reflection on the passing of the analogue era of books and publishing deeply elegiac, though I hope premature!