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FiveBooks Interviews
Dr James Miller has published a number of academic articles about African-American literature, Civil Rights and the 1960s counter-culture. He lectured in American literature at King’s College London and currently teaches creative writing at London’s South Bank University. He has been fascinated by apocalyptic novels from an early age. His new book, Sunshine State, is set in a futuristic world destroyed by climate change and the resulting economic breakdown. As a child Miller believed that if he had clean water, tinned food, medical equipment and a rifle he could survive nuclear war. But Raymond Briggs’s graphic novel on nuclear war smashed that belief. ‘We lived just outside London and I would often sit there thinking, are we just far enough away not to be vaporised when they vaporise London?’
Professor S Jay Kleinberg is director of the Centre for American, Trans-Atlantic and Caribbean History at London’s Brunel University. She was educated at the University of Pittsburgh and came to live in England in 1980. Her research focus is primarily in American Women’s, Gender, Family and Social Welfare History. She is chair of the British Historians of Women in the Americas and editor of its journal, History of Women in the Americas. She was formerly editor of the Journal of American Studies. The whole presidential campaign had the theme of abortion running through it a couple of years ago, she says, because Sarah Palin had a fifth child, the child had Down’s syndrome, her daughter was pregnant and she put this all in her militantly anti-abortion rhetoric.
Ali Ansari is the Professor of Iranian History and Director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews, as well as Associate Fellow of the Middle East Programme, Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House). He has just finished a study of the recent presidential elections, to be published this month. He is currently working on a book for Cambridge University Press entitled The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran, and has recently been appointed Editor of the Cambridge History of Iran Vol 8 (The Islamic Republic). It is difficult for Iranian people within the country to freely express their views, although the internet makes it easier, he says. But what has been published in the last decade before the current crackdown reflects the fact there is a literate readership that hungers for history.
Journalist and author Oliver Bullough chooses books on the Caucasus and says the only language Russia understands is unconditional surrender, whether Russia is ruled by the Tsars, the Communists or Vladimir Putin. He reminds us that in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia published after the war, the population of Kabardino-Balkaria was listed as 60 per cent Circassian, 10 per cent Russian. The 30 per cent of unmentioned indigenous Balkars had been deported, with about one third dying in the process.
Helon Habila was born in Nigeria in 1967. His first novel, Waiting for an Angel, won the Caine Prize in 2001. In 2002 he moved to England to become the African Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia. His writing has won many prizes including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, 2003. In 2005-2006 he was the first Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College in New York. He is contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review and in 2006 co-edited the British Council’s anthology, New Writing 14. His second novel, Measuring Time was published in February 2007 and his latest novel, Oil on Water, is out soon. He currently teaches creative writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he lives with his wife and children. He says Nigeria has a tradition of storytelling. ‘Before we were over taken by TV and video games it was very much part of our culture to tell stories. And this tradition still persists on the streets… you will see people spend hours just talking to each other!’
Jennifer Steil is a writer, journalist and actor currently living in Yemen. She has worked for several newspapers, both in America and abroad, while continuing to perform in theatres where it is legal for her to do so (ie, not in Yemen). Her memoir about running a newspaper in Yemen, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, is published by Doubleday. ‘People who put themselves in uncomfortable situations end up with interesting stories to tell,’ she says. ‘If I’d believed the US State Department website I would never have come to Yemen.’
Dr Lyubov Vinogradova was born in Moscow in 1973. After graduating from the Moscow Agricultural Academy and later defending a PhD in microbiology, she took a second degree in foreign languages, choosing English and German. In 1995 she was introduced to Antony Beevor and helped him research Stalingrad. Since then she has worked on many other research projects with Antony Beevor and other English-speaking writers and also her own projects. She is the co-author (together with Anthony Beevor) of A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army. She says American victims of the Great Depression came to Russia to find jobs and support their families in the 1920 and 30s. ‘The Soviet authorities used all sorts of tricks to get them to take up citizenship. They were told that they had to hand over their American passports temporarily and they never saw them again. And then they lost any rights that American citizens have or legal grounds to be protected. It was a great tragedy.’
James Purnell, Labour politician, who was the Member of Parliament for Stalybridge and Hyde from 2001 to 2010, is currently the head of the Open Left project at the left-leaning think tank Demos. He has previously served in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport; he resigned from the government on 4 June 2009, criticising the leadership of Gordon Brown. He says power with no ideas is hollow, and ideas without power are irrelevant and a betrayal of the ideas themselves.
Ian Thomson is a writer, critic and journalist. He is the author of Primo Levi: A Life (Hutchinson, 2002), which won the Royal Society of Literature’s W H Heinemann Award in 2003. His account of contemporary Jamaica, The Dead Yard, was published by Faber in 2009. ‘I think we have a view of Jamaica as being a rather laid-back place where there are no problems,’ he says. ‘Although, in my experience, in Jamaica when they say “no problem” there is one. The other side of all of this is that it is quite an uptight culture in many ways, and there’s a lot of Victorian morality, particularly with the churchgoing population, which is massive in Jamaica. There is a lot of what they call a “fenky-fenky” attitude towards sex, which is actually quite prudish.’ He says 1950s Britain was unmindful of the Commonwealth and disinclined to help Jamaicans. Italians in Britain after the war, selling ice cream and confectionery, were made to feel more welcome, despite having fought on Hitler’s side in the conflict. And yet Jamaicans, British subjects, were not treated as such.
Christian Wisskirchen has worked on Haiti since 1991. In 1992 he was among the founders of Haiti Support Group, which has become the leading pressure and solidarity group on Haiti in the UK. He is now chairman. He wrote a dissertation on the Haitian boat people (refugees) in 1994 and worked as a UN Human Rights Officer in Haiti in 1995. He is also head of International Relations of the Bar Council of England and Wales. During the US occupation from 1915-1945 Haitian uprisings were brutally suppressed, he says. For example, a Haitian worker in a forced labour gang set up by the US forces was murdered in cold blood when he was considered lazy by one of the guards. During that period the US restructured the Haitian army to become an oppressive tool for its foreign policy objectives in Haiti for decades to follow, and that was only ended by the dismissal of the army by President Aristide in 1995 (who was overthrown also by officers trained by the US army, at the notorious Fort Benson ‘School of the Americas’).