Browse content similar to 27/06/2013. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
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much a part of Wimbledon as strawberries and cream. It's time | :00:08. | :00:18. | |
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for Meet The Author with Nick crime in modern Turkey. That hasn't | :00:20. | :00:25. | |
stopped the Australian novelist, Katerina Cosgrove write writing Bone | :00:25. | :00:30. | |
Ash Sky. Sometimes harrowing novel, not just about what happened to the | :00:30. | :00:36. | |
article meanians but about the civil war in Beirut in 1980s. Lebanon is | :00:36. | :00:41. | |
where many article meanian refugees ended up. It's a tale of the | :00:42. | :00:50. | |
struggle to come it terms with the legacy of past violence. Katerina | :00:50. | :00:54. | |
Cosgrove this started out I imagine as a book about the article meanian | :00:55. | :00:59. | |
genocide which is a controversial top Turkey, if you were to call it a | :00:59. | :01:04. | |
genocide you would be committing a criminal offence -- Armenian. How | :01:04. | :01:09. | |
does a write writer come to find that as your subject? I knew nothing | :01:09. | :01:17. | |
about the Armenian genocide for many years. I had a friend who was a son | :01:17. | :01:24. | |
of holocaust survivors, Jew Jewish holocaust survivors. He mentioned | :01:24. | :01:29. | |
the Armenian genocide. That is when I started researching. I realised it | :01:29. | :01:34. | |
was a forgotten history and a secret story that needed to be told. It | :01:34. | :01:39. | |
inspired me enough to go to Armenia and meet the people there. You are | :01:39. | :01:44. | |
an Australian of Greek parentage, partly Greek parentage. You have | :01:44. | :01:48. | |
written in the past about your family, your grandmother and the | :01:48. | :01:54. | |
Greek civil war in the post-war period. How far did that, sort of, | :01:54. | :01:58. | |
second hand experience of writing about a divided, violently divided | :01:58. | :02:04. | |
society help you when you were writing this book? It helped me in | :02:04. | :02:10. | |
the sense that I have first-hand experience of how families and | :02:10. | :02:16. | |
nations can be torn apart by belief. And, I have first-hand experience of | :02:16. | :02:21. | |
how people can shatter their own lives by thinking that they have a | :02:22. | :02:27. | |
monopoly on truth. I've heard stories of my grandmother and | :02:27. | :02:33. | |
grandfather during the civil war where brother was against brother | :02:33. | :02:38. | |
and child against father. Very much so as a writer I feel it in my | :02:38. | :02:48. | |
:02:48. | :02:51. | ||
bones. I feel the suffering of these people in Armenia in Turkey, Syria | :02:51. | :02:57. | |
and Lebanon. Viewed it through the prison of Beirut in the 1980s, 19 | :02:57. | :03:03. | |
'90s. In the 1980s the civil war, Israeli invasion, siege of west | :03:03. | :03:09. | |
Beirut. Why do it that way? You made life complicated. It would have been | :03:09. | :03:15. | |
simpler to write about what happened in Armenia? Yes. My agent said, | :03:15. | :03:21. | |
let's write a story about the Armenia genocide. This book isn't | :03:22. | :03:26. | |
only about Armenia genocide it's about human suffering. The only way | :03:26. | :03:32. | |
I could show that was to show it in three different time frames with | :03:32. | :03:42. | |
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three dmreet -- completely different womens voices. This book is about | :03:45. | :03:50. | |
the fact that we have good and evil in all of us. One of the things that | :03:50. | :03:55. | |
strikes me is that a lot of your characters are victims of violence, | :03:55. | :04:03. | |
but also perpetrators of dark violence. One is the child of | :04:03. | :04:09. | |
Armenian refugees who becomes a militia man and is complicit in the | :04:09. | :04:18. | |
massacre of Palestinians. Is this a deep felt belief on your part that | :04:18. | :04:21. | |
perpetrators are themselves almost always victims? I don't believe that | :04:21. | :04:28. | |
is the case. I do have a deeply held philosophy that we are all capable | :04:28. | :04:30. | |
of anything according to circumstance. That we cannot judge. | :04:30. | :04:36. | |
So that if you and I were born in a refugee camp we don't know how that | :04:36. | :04:41. | |
would manifest. I do believe that we are all capable of change and growth | :04:41. | :04:47. | |
and my characters show that. Why do you think we in the West don't know | :04:47. | :04:54. | |
more about this? Partly, we don't care. I think partly because of the | :04:54. | :05:00. | |
genocide denial in Turkey, but, as I said, the more ingrained reason is | :05:00. | :05:06. | |
because the West, in a sense, thinks of these people as somebody over | :05:06. | :05:11. | |
there. The other. Somebody different. Somebody not like us. In | :05:11. | :05:16. | |
this book I've tried to show that they are exactly like us. The book | :05:16. | :05:22. | |
ends on a sort of note of qualified optimism. How difficult was it for | :05:22. | :05:27. | |
you to wrestle that from, frankly, some deeply unpromising material? | :05:27. | :05:35. | |
The story is one of repeated death and mayhem and murder and hatred? | :05:35. | :05:45. | |
:05:45. | :05:45. | ||
think... I wouldn't call it so much hopeful at the end as realistic. I | :05:45. | :05:52. | |
think that when it all finishes and everything is over then all that is | :05:52. | :05:56. | |
left is love. My characters at the end of each individual story do find | :05:56. | :06:04. | |
some form of love. That is all we're left with. Lebanon, modern Lebanon,s | :06:04. | :06:10. | |
has -- is no longer afflicted by civil war, it's a disturbed place. | :06:10. | :06:19. | |
The latest news is not good. Next door, Syria has gone into civil war. | :06:19. | :06:24. | |
Are you an optimist about the future of either of those places? Is it | :06:24. | :06:28. | |
possible to be optimistic? sectarian divides are so deep that | :06:28. | :06:36. | |
it is very difficult for me to be optimistic. I also think that unless | :06:36. | :06:41. | |
people - it comes from education, I think. Unless the children are | :06:41. | :06:45. | |
educated to see everyone as equal, not to think they have a monopoly on | :06:46. | :06:51. | |
truth, then there is no hope. that happening? I don't think it's | :06:51. | :06:57. | |
happening in any of those nations. What do you write about next? You | :06:57. | :07:01. | |
wrote about the Greek civil war. You twloet store, which clearly involved | :07:01. | :07:11. | |
a lot of research, where do you go from here? I'm writing a | :07:11. | :07:16. | |
post-apocalyptic eco thriller. My concerns are bigger. This is a | :07:16. | :07:22. |