:00:08. > :00:18.much a part of Wimbledon as strawberries and cream. It's time
:00:18. > :00:20.
:00:20. > :00:25.for Meet The Author with Nick crime in modern Turkey. That hasn't
:00:25. > :00:30.stopped the Australian novelist, Katerina Cosgrove write writing Bone
:00:30. > :00:36.Ash Sky. Sometimes harrowing novel, not just about what happened to the
:00:36. > :00:41.article meanians but about the civil war in Beirut in 1980s. Lebanon is
:00:42. > :00:50.where many article meanian refugees ended up. It's a tale of the
:00:50. > :00:54.struggle to come it terms with the legacy of past violence. Katerina
:00:55. > :00:59.Cosgrove this started out I imagine as a book about the article meanian
:00:59. > :01:04.genocide which is a controversial top Turkey, if you were to call it a
:01:04. > :01:09.genocide you would be committing a criminal offence -- Armenian. How
:01:09. > :01:17.does a write writer come to find that as your subject? I knew nothing
:01:17. > :01:24.about the Armenian genocide for many years. I had a friend who was a son
:01:24. > :01:29.of holocaust survivors, Jew Jewish holocaust survivors. He mentioned
:01:29. > :01:34.the Armenian genocide. That is when I started researching. I realised it
:01:34. > :01:39.was a forgotten history and a secret story that needed to be told. It
:01:39. > :01:44.inspired me enough to go to Armenia and meet the people there. You are
:01:44. > :01:48.an Australian of Greek parentage, partly Greek parentage. You have
:01:48. > :01:54.written in the past about your family, your grandmother and the
:01:54. > :01:58.Greek civil war in the post-war period. How far did that, sort of,
:01:58. > :02:04.second hand experience of writing about a divided, violently divided
:02:04. > :02:10.society help you when you were writing this book? It helped me in
:02:10. > :02:16.the sense that I have first-hand experience of how families and
:02:16. > :02:21.nations can be torn apart by belief. And, I have first-hand experience of
:02:22. > :02:27.how people can shatter their own lives by thinking that they have a
:02:27. > :02:33.monopoly on truth. I've heard stories of my grandmother and
:02:33. > :02:38.grandfather during the civil war where brother was against brother
:02:38. > :02:48.and child against father. Very much so as a writer I feel it in my
:02:48. > :02:51.
:02:51. > :02:57.bones. I feel the suffering of these people in Armenia in Turkey, Syria
:02:57. > :03:03.and Lebanon. Viewed it through the prison of Beirut in the 1980s, 19
:03:03. > :03:09.'90s. In the 1980s the civil war, Israeli invasion, siege of west
:03:09. > :03:15.Beirut. Why do it that way? You made life complicated. It would have been
:03:15. > :03:21.simpler to write about what happened in Armenia? Yes. My agent said,
:03:22. > :03:26.let's write a story about the Armenia genocide. This book isn't
:03:26. > :03:32.only about Armenia genocide it's about human suffering. The only way
:03:32. > :03:42.I could show that was to show it in three different time frames with
:03:42. > :03:45.
:03:45. > :03:50.three dmreet -- completely different womens voices. This book is about
:03:50. > :03:55.the fact that we have good and evil in all of us. One of the things that
:03:55. > :04:03.strikes me is that a lot of your characters are victims of violence,
:04:03. > :04:09.but also perpetrators of dark violence. One is the child of
:04:09. > :04:18.Armenian refugees who becomes a militia man and is complicit in the
:04:18. > :04:21.massacre of Palestinians. Is this a deep felt belief on your part that
:04:21. > :04:28.perpetrators are themselves almost always victims? I don't believe that
:04:28. > :04:30.is the case. I do have a deeply held philosophy that we are all capable
:04:30. > :04:36.of anything according to circumstance. That we cannot judge.
:04:36. > :04:41.So that if you and I were born in a refugee camp we don't know how that
:04:41. > :04:47.would manifest. I do believe that we are all capable of change and growth
:04:47. > :04:54.and my characters show that. Why do you think we in the West don't know
:04:54. > :05:00.more about this? Partly, we don't care. I think partly because of the
:05:00. > :05:06.genocide denial in Turkey, but, as I said, the more ingrained reason is
:05:06. > :05:11.because the West, in a sense, thinks of these people as somebody over
:05:11. > :05:16.there. The other. Somebody different. Somebody not like us. In
:05:16. > :05:22.this book I've tried to show that they are exactly like us. The book
:05:22. > :05:27.ends on a sort of note of qualified optimism. How difficult was it for
:05:27. > :05:35.you to wrestle that from, frankly, some deeply unpromising material?
:05:35. > :05:45.The story is one of repeated death and mayhem and murder and hatred?
:05:45. > :05:45.
:05:45. > :05:52.think... I wouldn't call it so much hopeful at the end as realistic. I
:05:52. > :05:56.think that when it all finishes and everything is over then all that is
:05:56. > :06:04.left is love. My characters at the end of each individual story do find
:06:04. > :06:10.some form of love. That is all we're left with. Lebanon, modern Lebanon,s
:06:10. > :06:19.has -- is no longer afflicted by civil war, it's a disturbed place.
:06:19. > :06:24.The latest news is not good. Next door, Syria has gone into civil war.
:06:24. > :06:28.Are you an optimist about the future of either of those places? Is it
:06:28. > :06:36.possible to be optimistic? sectarian divides are so deep that
:06:36. > :06:41.it is very difficult for me to be optimistic. I also think that unless
:06:41. > :06:45.people - it comes from education, I think. Unless the children are
:06:46. > :06:51.educated to see everyone as equal, not to think they have a monopoly on
:06:51. > :06:57.truth, then there is no hope. that happening? I don't think it's
:06:57. > :07:01.happening in any of those nations. What do you write about next? You
:07:01. > :07:11.wrote about the Greek civil war. You twloet store, which clearly involved
:07:11. > :07:16.a lot of research, where do you go from here? I'm writing a
:07:16. > :07:22.post-apocalyptic eco thriller. My concerns are bigger. This is a