‘The most exciting story is the story of people’s lives’
It could have been a setting straight from one of her books- the mellow glow of the Governor’s Residence at night on its hillside perch in Galle, a garden party on the lawn; except it’s in the cool of a tropical evening. It’s not difficult to spot Joanna Trollope in the crowd. Tall and willowy, impeccably attired in a diaphanous sea-green kurta, she has an effortless grace, an ease of manner that sees her turn to perfect strangers with smiling interest. Grace enough to consent to slip away to the back of the house even while the Galle Literary Festival launch party is lighting up and sit in a kitchen corridor, unfazed by insects whirring around (it’s that time of evening) so that interview deadlines can be met.
But then she understands deadlines. 2012 is a year full of them for this best-selling British novelist whose stories of fraught relationships and the complexities of contemporary life have won warm acclaim from readers, women in particular. She’s chairman of the Orange Prize for Fiction – the prestigious international women’s writers’ award that has brought in the likes of Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi and she’s also on the panel of the UK Sunday Times AFG Short Story prize in the very literary company of Melvyn Bragg, Hanif Kureishi and Edna O’brien.
The Orange is a prize she takes singular pleasure in - open to women writers all around the world, to books published in the UK between April 2011 and April 2012. The long list is chosen at the beginning of March, 20 books, the shortlist of six in April and the winner announced in May.
It is a mountain of work. “There are four judges for the Orange Prize besides her, (younger than my own daughters- she smiles), they all have 35 books to read and I read everything. Nobody can read 143 books in four months. I’m reading 100 pages intensively and skim reading to the end.” She was hoping to read everything electronically and found it impossible because “it homogenizes everything for me.…you can’t tell if you’re reading chick lit or War and Peace”.
To do the writers justice, she feels every book must be read at least by two people. “I want to treat every writer as seriously as I could and so I realised I had to read the book in the form that the writer saw it going out into the world- in its published form, in its proper jacket.”
“There is an enormous body of very good writers from all over the world,” she says, adding that while she sometimes sees a slight lack of originality in topic, the standard of writing is impressive. “I just think women could be braver - I don’t think any subject is off limits. I think the seed wisdom is that women should stick to a particular lot which is so not the case. There are fantastic books out there that tackle adventurous enormous universal themes - women really pull it off.”
She could be describing herself. In a career that she started off writing historical novels under the name Caroline Harvey, before penning under her own name the family dramas that strike deep into the heart of her readers, Joanna has established her space in the literary landscape for her forte is the timeless themes of life, love and relationships. Her new book ‘The Soldier’s Wife’ will be out in the UK in early February, again a theme that will surely resonate – Forces’ families and what it’s like when the men return from war. It’s a subject she has some familiarity with. She was four when she first saw her father who was serving with the British Army in India. “It was common back then,” she says matter-of-factly. “Now the men come back very quickly—in the old days the troopships would probably take three weeks now it’s 48 hours from Helmand to the UK. A shave, five pints of lager and a comedy show on a stop over in Cyprus and of course, their heads are all over the place.”
There’s lots of confusion and heartache and bewilderment, naturally, she says. The men have incredibly strong bonds with their comrades and the young women have brought up the children; so when they return the adjustments are very hard. And the Army, though admirable in many ways has not got