27/06/2013 Meet the Author

much a part of Wimbledon as strawberries and cream. It's time

for Meet The Author with Nick crime in modern Turkey. That hasn't

stopped the Australian novelist, Katerina Cosgrove write writing Bone

Ash Sky. Sometimes harrowing novel, not just about what happened to the

article meanians but about the civil war in Beirut in 1980s. Lebanon is

where many article meanian refugees ended up. It's a tale of the

struggle to come it terms with the legacy of past violence. Katerina

Cosgrove this started out I imagine as a book about the article meanian

genocide which is a controversial top Turkey, if you were to call it a

genocide you would be committing a criminal offence -- Armenian. How

does a write writer come to find that as your subject? I knew nothing

about the Armenian genocide for many years. I had a friend who was a son

of holocaust survivors, Jew Jewish holocaust survivors. He mentioned

the Armenian genocide. That is when I started researching. I realised it

was a forgotten history and a secret story that needed to be told. It

inspired me enough to go to Armenia and meet the people there. You are

an Australian of Greek parentage, partly Greek parentage. You have

written in the past about your family, your grandmother and the

Greek civil war in the post-war period. How far did that, sort of,

second hand experience of writing about a divided, violently divided

society help you when you were writing this book? It helped me in

the sense that I have first-hand experience of how families and

nations can be torn apart by belief. And, I have first-hand experience of

how people can shatter their own lives by thinking that they have a

monopoly on truth. I've heard stories of my grandmother and

grandfather during the civil war where brother was against brother

and child against father. Very much so as a writer I feel it in my

bones. I feel the suffering of these people in Armenia in Turkey, Syria

and Lebanon. Viewed it through the prison of Beirut in the 1980s, 19

'90s. In the 1980s the civil war, Israeli invasion, siege of west

Beirut. Why do it that way? You made life complicated. It would have been

simpler to write about what happened in Armenia? Yes. My agent said,

let's write a story about the Armenia genocide. This book isn't

only about Armenia genocide it's about human suffering. The only way

I could show that was to show it in three different time frames with

three dmreet -- completely different womens voices. This book is about

the fact that we have good and evil in all of us. One of the things that

strikes me is that a lot of your characters are victims of violence,

but also perpetrators of dark violence. One is the child of

Armenian refugees who becomes a militia man and is complicit in the

massacre of Palestinians. Is this a deep felt belief on your part that

perpetrators are themselves almost always victims? I don't believe that

is the case. I do have a deeply held philosophy that we are all capable

of anything according to circumstance. That we cannot judge.

So that if you and I were born in a refugee camp we don't know how that

would manifest. I do believe that we are all capable of change and growth

and my characters show that. Why do you think we in the West don't know

more about this? Partly, we don't care. I think partly because of the

genocide denial in Turkey, but, as I said, the more ingrained reason is

because the West, in a sense, thinks of these people as somebody over

there. The other. Somebody different. Somebody not like us. In

this book I've tried to show that they are exactly like us. The book

ends on a sort of note of qualified optimism. How difficult was it for

you to wrestle that from, frankly, some deeply unpromising material?

The story is one of repeated death and mayhem and murder and hatred?

think... I wouldn't call it so much hopeful at the end as realistic. I

think that when it all finishes and everything is over then all that is

left is love. My characters at the end of each individual story do find

some form of love. That is all we're left with. Lebanon, modern Lebanon,s

has -- is no longer afflicted by civil war, it's a disturbed place.

The latest news is not good. Next door, Syria has gone into civil war.

Are you an optimist about the future of either of those places? Is it

possible to be optimistic? sectarian divides are so deep that

it is very difficult for me to be optimistic. I also think that unless

people - it comes from education, I think. Unless the children are

educated to see everyone as equal, not to think they have a monopoly on

truth, then there is no hope. that happening? I don't think it's

happening in any of those nations. What do you write about next? You

wrote about the Greek civil war. You twloet store, which clearly involved

a lot of research, where do you go from here? I'm writing a

post-apocalyptic eco thriller. My concerns are bigger. This is a