I’m the product of all that I’ve read’

Sudjic’s novel examines the scars of childhood trauma through Anya who survived the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s

1 How did the idea behind Asylum Road take shape?

I wanted to write about certain self-destructive impulses. I wanted to explore these impulses through familiar forms of national or collective self-harm, such as civil war, the 2008 financial crash, anthropogenic climate change, which are the background to the book, as well as on an individual level - staying in a relationship with someone who causes us pain or makes us into a person we don’t want to be, attacking our own bodies or letting them waste away, and so on, which forms the foreground of the novel. I see the novel as taking aim at myths of exceptionalism in that way, and I think the drive to do this, or to explore these questions in novel form, grew from the sense of polarisation and fragmentation in the UK (where I live) at the time of writing it, in the lead up to the Brexit referendum. You could certainly say it’s a post-Brexit novel.

2 The articulation of trauma when it came to a younger generation that witnessed the horrors of the Bosnian war is nuanced. What were your sources?

Speaking to my Balkan family about our own history of migration, staying in the region, reading primary texts like Zlata’s Diary (by Zlata Filipović), speaking to those working at the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, reading the accounts of childhood psychologists who worked with Bosnian children… lots of different ways. But ultimately, I’m not trying to write non-fiction, and I didn’t want it to read like a history - because it isn’t, nor is it going to be representative. My main character feels like an outsider to that history, someone who struggles to claim any identity, and she does not try to speak for anyone other than herself.

3 How has the pandemic altered your writing schedule?

WHAT SCHEDULE ??? :) :) I have lost all focus. I have also really found it difficult to motivate myself and I think a part of that is the lack of everyday external stimulus. When I do get outside-world-information, it’s the news, and it’s all terrible, which is paralysing. Not like when I used to sit and people watch in cafes and be inspired to write a scene.

What are you working on next?

Any upcoming writing projects?

I’m working on my next book, Desire Lines, which I’m also doing a PhD on - its supposed to be hybrid book merging personal memoir and cultural criticism about why we conform (or don’t) to plans and expectations, but the pandemic has really thrown me off course - which, however annoying, is very on-theme for the book!