“Because there is a tendency for people to be written out of history if they seem to be untidy in some way and I think one of the things that’s really important to me is to show that everybody who’s here today, they’ve always been here and they have stories as well.”
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Welcome everyone and thank you for joining this Mishcon Academy Session, part of a series of online events, videos and podcasts looking at the biggest issues faced in society today. I am Georgia Humphrey, Senior Social Media Executive at Mishcon de Reya and I’m hosting today’s event. So I am delighted to be joined today by International bestselling Author, Natasha Pulley. Uh Natasha has written quote a lot of books, I have them all here um, and is perhaps most well-known for her award winning debut novel, ‘The Watchmaker of Filigree Street’ which became the first in a long line of historical and futuristic novels with rich intriguing narratives and beautiful LGBT storylines. Her latest book, ‘The Hymn to Dionysus’ is a retelling of Greek myth uh, described as a triumph of queer narrative. So welcome Natasha.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Ah thank you very much; it’s lovely to be here.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
I definitely agree with that review by the way, it is a triumph um but there are probably some people in the room who haven’t read the book yet so I wondered if we could start with a bit of an introduction to The Hymn to Dionysus.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Absolutely, so this is a book but it is set in the slightly recorded past, it’s actually set around the year 1200 BC, so some time ago um and it follows a young thegn soldier called Phaidros and he has quite a strange and stressful life. He fights in the War at Troy as described in places like the Iliad and the Odyssey but the book starts really when he comes home from Troy to a terrible famine and sickness, plague and his city is just slowly dying. The reason that it’s dying everyone thinks is that it’s been cursed by a God and Phaidros has a particular sense that he knows which God this is because he’s the one who offended him and he’s worried that it is Dionysus, the God of Madness.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah. He’s having a great time for a lot of this book um…
Natasha Pulley
Author
Yeah. Happy people are boring alright.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah that I would agree. As someone who loves sad books and loves to cry in a book, I absolutely agree. Um, with this one we’re going quite a lot further back than you’ve gone in your other work. What drew you initially to writing in this world?
Natasha Pulley
Author
So I love anything to do with ancient Greece I think like an awful lot of people and I’ve been reading The Song of Achilles and then I’d been reading a wonderful writer called Mary Reno who I really, really love um, and then I sort of sat back and went, you know what though I would really like to read something about Dionysus because he’s such a fascinating figure and there’s a kind of mystery around him which is, why is he not in the Iliad and I was like, I’d love to read that so I kind of trawled around um, and somebody said to me, oh you know, Donna Tar, The Secret History. I was like I don’t really think that’s about ancient Greece, it’s about a group of students who study ancient Greek and try to summon Dionysus but he’s not really in it and I was like, it’s a great book and everything, it’s not about Dionysus is it? Being like, got very sniffy about the whole thing and I couldn’t find what I wanted to read and so I sort of, I sat back one morning and went, oh alright then I’ll write it. So that was what was behind it.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Is that kind of your usual process? Are you, are you often looking for the kind of gap in what you want to read with your other books?
Natasha Pulley
Author
Yeah very much so um, I wrote a book called The Half Life of Valery K, and I wrote that because I’d watched a wonderful HBO TV series called Chernobyl and loved it and then I read a fantastic non-fiction book by a Ukrainian academic caller Serhii Plokhy uh, partly upon which the TV series was based. It’s called Chernobyl and it’s a blow-by-blow account of what happened. Um, and when I was reading that there is a footnote - I kid you not - a footnote that says, and of course the scientists like Valerov La Belousov 4.19, knew what to do when reactor 4 went off because this has happened before in 1958, and I went, this happened when? What? What do you mean it’s happened before? A reactor has gone critical before. And not only had a reactor gone critical before, this sounds like the plot of a James Bond novel that was never written but here we go. In 1958 there was a huge disaster at a plutonium refinement site called City 40 – doesn’t it sound Bondy – um, in a region of Russia called Kyshtym which is way, way in the east by the Ural mountains and this place was built under a lake to be secret from the American spy planes and satellites going over and one day somebody made a huge mistake and it exploded gloriously and people 90 miles away came down with radiation sickness – I kid you not, you can look it up and I went, I want to read a book about that, that’s insane. And I was, I was looking and I was looking and there were a few bits of soviet literature that are maybe slightly about it. There’s a great book um, by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky called Roadside Picnic that people think might be a little bit about the disaster at City 40. Again, I couldn’t find one. I was like fine, I’ll learn Russian then.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
I was so surprised when I got to the end of Valery K when you have your little author’s note about how much of it is historically accurate. I was so surprised that you hadn’t made all of that up about the, the underground lakes, all that kind of stuff.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Not made up.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah I was so shocked.
Natasha Pulley
Author
It’s, it’s grand, you should go on Wikipedia and read about this, it’s wonderful. I mean obviously it’s tragic and terrible…
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Sure.
Natasha Pulley
Author
…but it’s also great.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yes. So do you find, obviously this is slightly different to your other books in that we are not in kind of real history, we’re in classical myth rather than history. Um, I would imagine there’s a bit of a tension when you write historical fiction between what really happened or what could have really happened and what is interesting for a book. Do you find that’s kind of easier or harder when you’re working rather with, rather than with real history with a kind of classical canon, for lack of a better word?
Natasha Pulley
Author
So I would say that the, the pattern that has always held for me is that the further back into the past you go, the easier it is to write a book without annoying anyone. Because if you’re in fairly recent history there will be people who were there and who remember it and if you say, oh you know, this happened on this Tuesday morning they’ll be like, actually it was Thursday. And those people will write to you and it’s very annoying and you send them anthrax in the post and it’s a whole thing.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
(laughing)
Natasha Pulley
Author
If you go back before living memory it’s a little bit easier because you’re just working from sources so you will be very careful about things like World War 1 or the 1890’s but you don’t need to worry quite so much that somebody was there. Go further back still, fewer and fewer people will have read those sources because English gets harder the further back into history you go. And then if you go back to a time before modern writing systems which this is, we have some historical record but they’re only the tax records of these cities so there is a historical record of thieves in the year 1200 BC but it’s literally just a few tablets that say things like, 14 bushels of apples to the Temple of Poseidon. And scholars spend entire careers trying to work out what that means. Um, in a system that is not related to modern Greek, it’s, it’s got the most amazingly creative name, do you want to hear what their writing system is called?
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
I think we can all agree we do yeah.
Natasha Pulley
Author
It’s called Linear B. Isn’t that fun? Isn’t that a creative name for an ancient writing system.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Very creative.
Natasha Pulley
Author
And it’s kind of wonderful because when these, when these tablets were discovered and they were discovered across the territory that we now call Greece um, they are, they are just clay tablets and um, people duck them up on archaeological sites and they went, oh my goodness this is amazing, maybe there’s going to be a new epic poem like the Iliad, maybe it’s going to be a great play, a great work of art. No, it is the tax records. So all we have left of this particular culture which is uh, broadly known as Mycenaean Greece are their tax records and that is the equivalent of us today being judged by the contents of a few cabinets at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. Which is incredibly depressing right, like that’s all the textual evidence we have left. For scholars that’s dreadful because it means that you have to then do some archaeological guess work and try and reconstruct. Can you reconstruct ancient thieves? No because it is under modern thieves and oddly everybody who lives there, does not want you to dig up their garden. So there’s a small part of thieves that has been excavated because the city has shifted slightly downhill over the years but mostly there’s not a lot of archaeological evidence; there’s, there’s textual evidence but minimal and so all you can do as a writer when you research this is look at the tax records, look at the archaeological records, read some scholars who reckon they know what was going on – spoiler: none of them do – and then you make it up. Because no matter what anyone says, we do not know what was happening in thieves in 1200 BC. We have a vague idea of what was going on in the Mediterranean at that time. We have a sense that yes there was a Trojan War. We don’t know what it was fought about, it was probably Black Sea shipping rights, nothing as romantic as you know, a woman being stolen or running away, you know, the face that launched a thousand ships, rubbish, taxes, it’s always about taxes and that’s really it and we don’t know anything else. There are two ways to write historical fiction. One, is to try and say, what is the likeliest course of events and this is historical fiction of the Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall kind. You collate as many sources as you possibly can. You read them incredibly thoroughly and then what you do is you use those as lighthouses in the book. So you say, we know this happened, I have to get to this point. And you try and write the likely gaps in between. However, as we all know from just living real life, real history rarely take the likely path and so when you have a conservative guess about what might have gone on, often it’s two shades too anodyne, two shades too dull to really reflect what actually happened. We don’t know what actually happened and particularly when you’re talking about deep past, those lighthouse become fewer and fewer and further and further between which means we, there are just gulfs of time that we cannot account for. There are no textual sources, there are no archaeological sources. We can only guess and so another way of writing historical fiction is to say, I don’t care what scholars think the likely course of action was because often that’s wrong. I’m going to say what the most interesting course of action might have been and for the purposes of a novel, that can work better. It would be very dry if I wrote about the tax system of ancient thieves.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Natasha Pulley
Author
So I decided not to do that.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah I probably wouldn’t have read it quite so quickly so.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Yeah. So I thought God of Madness might be a bit more interesting.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Absolutely.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Yeah cool.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
And when it comes to the, obviously the book is centred round the figure of Dionysus, the God of Madness. Um, how do you sort through the, the classical myths for what you will include in your story, your version of Dionysus?
Natasha Pulley
Author
So I actually took a very historicist approach. I, I complain about how these sources are very boring and then I take an incredibly dull approach to this which is, so there’s this rich history of myths about Dionysus, he’s a very old God. We think he pre-dates Zeus, there are altars in Miletus in Greece that were dedicated to Dionysus before we find anything being dedicated the Zeus so he’s really, really old. What I tried to do was not include anything that evolves after the date that I was writing about. So Dionysus as a God, as a God of a huge Roman cult has stories and stories and stories and they evolve over time. There, there’s even a Greek novel written about him in the 1st Century AD um, by a great writer called Nonnus um, it’s called the Dionysiaca, I knobbed quite a lot of it for this. Um, but a lot of that refers to older myths um so anything that’s sort of newly developed after this date I tried to discount. Trying to get back to the oldest version of Dionysus that I could but that’s not really very possible and none of this is written down, as I say, we’ve only got the tax records so a lot of it was guess work, a lot of it was okay, it evolves into this by the 5th Century AD, work backwards, what’s it likely to be, likely to be, likely to be, maybe, maybe, maybe possibly, this is more fun, let’s do this. So it’s a very convoluted not very scholarly process but there was a sort of general train of reasoning.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah interesting. Now we’ve kind of talked about it a little bit earlier um, these kind of classical re-telling are having a bit of a renaissance at the moment, things like Simon Kelly. What is it you think kind of speaks to people about these classical re-telling’s at the moment?
Natasha Pulley
Author
Well actually I think it’s um, we perceive at the moment that they are having a bit of a renaissance and it’s becoming more and more popular but actually all throughout Western history this has been popular. So I mean, Shakespeare was writing about ancient Greece, Timon of Athens, right and this was incredibly popular with the Romans, the Romans watched plays by Escalus and writers like Plautus made an effort to write about ancient Greece and all the rest of it. So all through history this has been popular. I think the big revolution that has happened in the 20th Century is that it’s novels that are becoming popular rather than plays and I think it’s just partly that novels are much easier to write and they’re more accessible because you don’t have to pay a bunch of people to go on stage and perform it, there’s not a whole administrative chore to write a novel, you just sit at your kitchen table like a loser and write it. Which is very much most writers’ experience of being novelists. Um, so it’s cheap to write a novel, um it’s much easier to consume a novel than it is to consume a play, um and again, cheaper to consume a novel than to consume a play these days. So we’re seeing this renaissance in the novel form which I, I think is great but I think what that’s reflecting really is just a sort of enduring love of these stories that have swept right through history and you see Greek culture referring back to these stories in the height of their playwriting days, which is about 500 BC in Athens. Writers like Escalus are taking about the Iliad which is from about 400 years before at least and it’s talking about events that happened 700 years before so for them it’s already historical fiction.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Natasha Pulley
Author
For them that’s like us writing about the Battle of Hastings. It’s that long ago.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Quite mind boggling if you think about it.
Natasha Pulley
Author
This much history, yeah and people, people talk about them and retell them and retell them and retell them and I think the phase that we’re in at the moment is that this is becoming novelised but we do have to remember that even in the 50’s and 60’s, people were doing this. People like Mary Renault were writing books about Ancient Greece, she wrote books about Theseus and the Minotaur and then we get writers like Marguerite Yourcenar writing about Emperor Hadrian um, and it’s just uh, I think it’s a trend that has actually been more or less unbroken which I really love.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah it’s nice to be part of that kind of, that trend.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Yeah.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Long lasting trend.
Natasha Pulley
Author
And they all respond to the last, respond to the last and respond to the original so it’s this great conversation that happens down millennia.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah. One thing I find really interesting about most of your work actually but um, Dionysus especially is that even though we are in the very ancient past, you bring in a lot of what we would think of as very like modern elements like explorations of what one might erroneously describe as like woke things like mental health and disability and like you know, all that fun stuff that definitely only existing in the last like 50 years right.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Um so I’m interested in kind of your process of bringing those sorts of elements into what is quite an archaic world and it, it always seems so, so uh genuine and, and well, put in so I am fascinated by your process of bringing those elements into this world?
Natasha Pulley
Author
It’s such an interesting question because I didn’t put them in. They are in the original texts, they are right there. So we have this, of course we have a pre-occupation with mental health. Today it’s very important to us, Dionysus is the God of Mental Health.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Natasha Pulley
Author
So here’s a really cruel thing that I thought was ace when I was doing research right. So I spent a lot of time reading like military history because as I have previously established, writers are losers and we just live at our kitchen tables and one of the very first, in fact I think the very first recorded instance of, I, I don’t know what it’s called now but it used to be called hysterical blindness of a soldier losing his sight on the battlefield for no physical reason, is in Ancient Greece and his companions recognise what this was, they recognise that it was Dionysus who had done this to him and hurried him immediately off the battlefield. So there was this recognition that Dionysus was the God of Battle Madness which is what they called it. Today we’d call it PTSD but this is not a newly recognised thing, the Greeks knew about it and one of the things that I think we can all agree that the odyssey is about is a man with severe battle fatigue, severe battle madness so it’s about Odysseus who has fought for nine years in the Trojan War, he has seen brutal, horrendous things, takes seven years to get home because the Goddess Athena has slightly forgotten about him but never mind. When he does get home he goes on an absolute rampage. He kills all the people in his house who you know, they’re not very welcome guests but they don’t really deserve to be shot and he doesn’t just say like, okay time to leave lads. He’s like, no I will kill you and hang you up from a tree. Which he does. And then he starts dismembering random slaves. That’s going a bit far even if you’re an ancient Greek and I think people at the time would have recognised that it was a bit far. If you read Greek plays, my favourite one is, is Ajax by Sophocles. That’s about a man with raging PTSD, it’s about an old fashioned chivalric Greek warrior who goes mad after a long battle and just kills uh, a herd of goats or sheep because he thinks that they are enemy troops in the night. He is terrible to his wife and eventually he’s so ashamed of what he’s done that he kills himself. And again this happens to Heracles as well. These are conical stories, Heracles has seen too much bloodshed, he wakes up in the night, thinks he’s in enemy territory, murders what he thinks are enemy soldiers, it’s his family and there again, there is a play called Heracles where that happens. Again it’s Soph… no it’s Euripides, Um, it’s all about PTSD, all these stories are about men who go mad because they have seen terrible things. Dionysus is the God of that. So these are not things that I’ve inserted, at all. These are things that are very much front and centre in the original sources.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah I think the, as a modern reader reading The Hymn to Dionysus that the kind of comparison between the, the Dionysus induced madness and what we as modern people would recognise that as PTSD is so interesting because there is that sense that it’s the same to everyone in the book but to a modern reader you’re like, oh but this is God caused and this is like what, a natural consequence of your life so it’s kind of fascinating to think about how that would not have been viewed as anything different in the ancient world but it obviously is to us because we are not routinely um, like encountering Dionysus and being made may by him so.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Well the thing is and I think you are completely right to say this, in the ancient world there was no, there was no differentiation between what a God did and what nature did, these were the same things. So I think the best way I’ve ever heard it described is if you try to say to somebody in the ancient world, like I don’t believe in Afrodyta. That’s like you saying you saying you don’t believe in the force of love. They go, but of course you believe in Afrodyta, you’ve been in love right? You’ve experienced Afrodyta. So they’re not saying that there is a God of this thing in a kind of like anthropomorph sized oddly symbolic thing, they’re saying, no the feeling itself is the God, the madness is Dionysus, love is Afrodyta, Poseidon is the sea. To say you didn’t believe in Poseidon was like saying you didn’t believe in the sea. They’d like, they’d lock you up and it would be like, what are you talking about.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Wander down to the beach there he is.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Yeah there he is look, he’s angry, it’s a storm. What do you want. So it is, what they’re saying is that natural forces have sentients and that’s the only difference between the way that they see the world and the way we see the world.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah, it’s interesting to think about it. It would be fun if we still thought about these things in the same way.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Yeah, yeah.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Um, so I was reading some of your other interviews where you were talking about your process um, and I am fascinated by your method writing. I believe that your mum coined this, method writing.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Yeah my mum calls it method writing.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
So did you go full method, were you wandering around wearing like an old toga, what was, what was the method for this?
Natasha Pulley
Author
I didn’t unfortunately wander round wearing a toga and I unfortunately didn’t you know, go full Maenad and like rip a man apart with my bare hands after drinking a lot.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Rats.
Natasha Pulley
Author
I know, rats. I think my brother was quite relieved that I didn’t do that. Um, I did learn Greek. Um I sat down and I learned Ancient Greek across one summer because I’m an academic and I get summer holidays off. Isn’t it obnoxious? It’s very annoying, I’m one of those people who gets loads of time off. So I learned Greek to the point that I could read sections of the Iliad, definitely not the whole thing because that’s you know, you would be third year undergraduate before you could do that. I’m not that dedicated but I, I got so that I could read a decent amount of Greek and I went through and I read some poems about Dionysus , I read interesting bits of the Iliad and I was really passionate about it and it was going really, really well and then I hit philosophy, I hit Plato and went, sod that. I just lost the will to live. So that was it but that was the method writing for this one. It was me trying to read in Greek.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah well really delving into the language. So no chance of a translation into Greek of this book is there?
Natasha Pulley
Author
I don’t think so. I don’t think so. There’s not a huge Greek publishing market for English novels I have to say.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Tragic, I can’t imagine why. Um, so we are currently in Pride month of course um, it is a prevailing theme of most of your work that you have interesting LGBT characters um, I would just like to know why you think that’s an important thing to include in your work?
Natasha Pulley
Author
I think it’s a really important thing to include particularly in historical fiction um, because there is a tendency for people to be written out of history if they seem to be untidy in some way and I think one of the things that’s really important to me is to show that everybody who’s here today, they’ve always been here.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Uh hum.
Natasha Pulley
Author
And they have stories as well and it’s really important to remind everybody that they were always here. It’s not a new woke invention.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Natasha Pulley
Author
They’ve always been here and one of the aspects of, of this book that I care a lot about was putting front and centre a really fascinating military system that existed we think in Spartan thieves at this time which is that the, the shop troops, the frontline infantry unit, so the well hardest of the well hard, the people who would go into battle first, the people whose life expectancy was 30, so you know, so they would, about half of these troops would die by the time they were 30 because of the shock tactics that they were involved in. These units were made up of pairs of men who’d been matched up by the Garrison, one older, one younger. They were lovers and the point was, it was a kind of arranged marriage, and the point was if the person you love is with you on the frontline, you do not break the line and it worked for about a 1000 years. It’s unbelievable and we have records um, of a unit called the Theban Band, so a band of these soldiers from thieves even though, actually called the Sacred Band um, and they were still active in the time of Philip of Macedon and he was Alexander the Great’s father. So they were probably active for about this time all the way down through history. The Spartan’s did it, we think the Theban’s did it as well.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah that, that, we have always been here is where love, queer historical fiction because it’s so like…
Natasha Pulley
Author
Yeah.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
…gratifying to be like yeah we didn’t, we didn’t just pop into existence in the last like 50 years.
Natasha Pulley
Author
No.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
We have in fact always been here.
Natasha Pulley
Author
And it’s not like, you’re not like shoe horning modern politics into an old narrative like, these guys were the narrative and I think this is why The Song of Achilles is so good and what Madeline Miller did was so good because the Iliad has often been seen as this uh, rather blokey thing that only you know, elderly gentleman can enjoy and it isn’t. It’s, it’s not at all. It’s about a man who was very, very devoted to another man and completely changed the course of a War because of what happened to him.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah. Not, I’m not going to give any spoilers um, I am very clear I am talking about Natasha’s work in general not specifically about this book but what I find really interesting about your work is your endings and how generally speaking, giving no specifics of any particular book, your characters tend to end in a, in a, at least a hopeful way if not totally happy.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Yeah.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
And it’s fascinating to me as an undergraduate, I wrote a lot about how uh, queer endings are usually awful and tragic.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Yeah.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
The Bury Your Gays Trope exists for a reason.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Yeah.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Is that something that you had been consciously doing as you write?.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Very much so.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Great.
Natasha Pulley
Author
It really um, am I allowed to swear a little bit do we think?
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yes.
Natasha Pulley
Author
It really pisses me off right when like you get this amazing love story and then it’s like, oh and then of course he was attached to the back of a truck and, and killed like yeah. That’s an unsatisfying ending, it’s really, really annoying and I really hate it and it’s just, it’s, it’s a very 19th Century judgy, if you are not a very dull upright Christian then you will end badly. If you dance on a Sunday you’ll be dead by page 42. Don’t you dare fall in love with the wrong person.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Natasha Pulley
Author
And it’s all very Thomas Hardy isn’t it?
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Uh hum.
Natasha Pulley
Author
But um, so I think it’s really important if you’re writing a queer narrative to make sure that every now and then someone gets the ending that they bloody deserve which is actually alright.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah, I do love to cry in a book but I prefer when I am just crying like generally not because I’ve been totally devastated by the end because they’ve all died. So that was great.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Yeah.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah. Um, what I also think is interesting in this book um, and as someone who’s not a classical scholar and really doesn’t know a huge amount about the classical world um, I was interested in particularly the position of women um, kind of in the same way that I am in the position of LGBT people um, especially the women soldiers that are in the book. Is that something that, that comes from history? Is that something that came from you?
Natasha Pulley
Author
So I made that up.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Right.
Natasha Pulley
Author
And the reason that I made it up is that we don’t know who the soldiers were um, there’s a lot of very interesting evidence to say that a slightly different culture at the time um, Minoan Crete, which was the power in this world at this time and it’s kind of, kind of like America versus everyone else. Um, they were a matriarchy almost certainly and you only have to look at their artwork which is full of women drawn very, very large at the forefront of the work and maybe there’s a few guys in the background to see that this is who they think was important. And this is the culture that built the labyrinth um, this is the culture where we get the, the Theseus and the Minotaur myth from um, so they’re probably a matriarchy. If you are a matriarchy it’s likely that women are doing all sorts of jobs. The other thing that I was thinking was that in this time, in this place, because we’ve read the Iliad we often think that you know, Greek warriors were like heroic and amazing and are wonderful and they’re not, they’re raiders, they’re pirates. More than anything the best comparison for them that I think is the Vikings. And women were Vikings. So I feel like in this culture at this time with the cultural influences like Minoan Crete that they have, definitely a matriarchy it’s likely that we would have seen female soldiers. We don’t, we don’t have any evidence for this but we don’t have any evidence for basically anything from this period. Um, we don’t have statues from this period, we don’t have a lot of writing apart from the tax records for this period. We don’t know what was going on and at that point you can write what you want and I feel like it would be interesting if we had this.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Natasha Pulley
Author
So that was, that was the way of thinking.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
I thought it was interesting to have this so yeah it worked. Well done.
Natasha Pulley
Author
I’m glad, I’m glad.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
And I think yeah, it’s a, I think that’s the beauty of this kind of world when you can make it up because it doesn’t exist and why not elevate women, why not talk about women in an interesting way, why not not side-line them you know.
Natasha Pulley
Author
And I think the other thing to say here is that even the text that we think are a sort of true reflection of this time, so like, like the Iliad, you’re like, oh but you know if it isn’t like it is in the Iliad then it’s not historically accurate. I’m sorry, the Iliad is not historically accurate. The Iliad was written about 750 BC and it was definitely about 300, 400 years after the events of the Trojan War. It’s full of historical inaccuracies, absolutely chock full of them um, from the kinds of armour that people wear to troop movements to even the way that Kingdoms are arranged. This is not historically accurate to what we know was going on in Mausoleum Greece. The Iliad is a pile of garbage. It is not a historical record, it is a poem, it is made up. It reflects probably Athenian culture in 750 BC which is very different to the culture of other Greek city states, 300, 400 years before so anyone who thinks that the Iliad represents a historic version of what happened is dreaming. All historical fiction represents the views of the time in which it was written and so if you go back even to Greek plays, most of them are written in about 500 BC Athens so what you get is 500 BC Athenian politics cast on to ancient mythology in the same way that today you will get 21st Century politics cast back into ancient myth. It’s nothing new and making it up is completely legitimate, that is what we’ve always done.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah and I think there’s a, a tendency for critics of classical retellings to pretend like this is new, that nobody has ever uh, done something different with a classical myth.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Yeah.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
And nobody has ever brought their own political situation, their own views into a classical tale which is obviously ridiculous. Read any Shakespeare you know.
Natasha Pulley
Author
We, read Escalus.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Dude, what do you think he was writing about. He wasn’t writing about you know, a thousand years ago. He was writing about Athens right then. Yeah.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah exactly and I think people get a bit mixed up about kind of what the purpose of a classical retelling is you know, it’s not necessarily to be uh, exactly as every classical myth you’ve ever read, it’s supposed to say something.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Well again I think you are completely right and I think there is a spectrum and it, this links to what I mentioned before about the different types of historical fiction and different approaches. There are some writers who will go back to what we have from the Greek and Latin sources and meticulously reconstruct them and what they’re often doing as much as kind of telling their own story, is translating. So this is what you’re getting in those books is something very, very close. Um, and I think often you can see translations of the Iliad coming through in Madeline Miller’s work, it’s really beautiful even though she does add lots and lots of stuff. And then there are other books that say, well you know what, the original, the original myth was also made up so I’m going to make up something based on the made up thing and so it’s not like that first approach is getting towards a more authentic version. It isn’t. It’s just closer to a translation but it’s historical fiction right. Fiction.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah, is a key part of it.
Natasha Pulley
Author
It’s, we’re not historians writing a PhD thesis or a monograph for an academic journal, we’re writing stories and the nature of stories is that they flux and change and respond to each other over time. A story is having a conversation with previous writers down through the centuries. It is not trying to get back to the original version of anything. That’s lost. We will never discover what happened in 1200 BC in Thieves or at Troy until exactly the point that we develop time travel. Until that point it is really anyone’s best guess because all we’ve got are a few ruined walls and some tax records.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Absolutely and it’s such a beautiful canvas to, to create something lovely from. I was particularly taken with um, is it Phaedrus or Phaedrus? I couldn’t decide.
Natasha Pulley
Author
So, Latin got its hands on hits name…
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Okay.
Natasha Pulley
Author
…and produce Phaedrus which I think is nonsensical. In Greek it is spelled Phaedrus.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Phaedrus, okay.
Natasha Pulley
Author
So that’s what I say.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
I was really taken with Phaedrus as a character um, I like a, a kind of an angry character you know.
Natasha Pulley
Author
He’s well angry.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah, yeah. So um, how do you kind of go about creating him as, as the, the like, the lens through which we see your version of this classical world?
Natasha Pulley
Author
So when I first wrote the first draft of this he was actually a much more neutral person, it was a much less opinionated point of view um, and then my brother went through and read it and went, you’re telling me that this person is a soldier? Have you met soldiers? And I went, yeah you’re write and put in a lot more swearing. But it was, but had happened to me was, was happens to lots and lots of readers which is you think that because something is set in the past, and you’ve read epic poetry about it, it must be in some way elevated and these people must think in a, a beautiful way that kind of translates really nicely into, you know, epic hexameters and of course they didn’t. I, I guarantee that anyone who actually fought in the War at Troy would punch you in the face if you tried to tell them anything in epic hexameters and I’m absolutely certain that nobody, no soldier and no human in the history of humanity has ever said, Lo. Nobody.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
No?
Natasha Pulley
Author
No. They’ll have yelled swear words across courtyards at people they don’t like.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Natasha Pulley
Author
And that’s exactly what Phaedrus does.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
And I think it, it makes such a more relatable character obviously than all of the ‘lo’ type characters that you get.
Natasha Pulley
Author
I think so. I think so and I say this as also like quite an opinionated, I don’t think I’m an angry person but I’m easily provoked um, so I was in Rome a couple of days ago, I was interviewing priests you know, priests, like nice mild people in Rome and they weren’t even proper priests, they were baby priests, they were seminarians, they were still training. And after talking to them for about four minutes at the top of my voice I yelled, bastards to an entire seminary and they were fine with it.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
That’s good.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Um, but that’s who I am. So that’s very much what kind of came through with Phaedrus as well.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Do you find that each of your narrators for books kind of brings out a different side of your personality? Are you all of these people combined?
Natasha Pulley
Author
Yeah. And, and I think that’s, that’s true of every writer, to some extent you’re writing a facet of your own personality.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Natasha Pulley
Author
And one of, I think one of the skills of writing really different voices which I don’t have, um, because most of these voices sound a little bit similar, they all sound like me I feel like now you’ve heard me talk, you’ll read a book and go, yeah she’s writing herself. Um, but the skill that really great writers have is that they can turn very different facets of themselves outwards and write in that voice um, it’s amazing.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Can you?
Natasha Pulley
Author
I, I can’t do that, I’m, I’m always basically a little bit grumpy and sweary yeah.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Well those are the best kind of characters.
Natasha Pulley
Author
I hope so.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah. Do you think any of your narrators are the most similar to you?
Natasha Pulley
Author
Um, January of The Mars House is very, very similar.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
One of my favourites.
Natasha Pulley
Author
I think I think in footnotes.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Natasha Pulley
Author
So that’s why they’re there.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Um so we’ve got about 20 minutes left. Were there any questions in the room or online for Natasha? Oh great, some already. Just wait for the microphone to round anybody. Yeah?
Audience
Okay um, so I’m not that familiar with the rest of your work but I was just wondering now you’ve done Ancient Greece, is there any other time periods in history you’d be interested in exploring, learning about, writing about?
Natasha Pulley
Author
Well lately I’ve got a little bit obsessed with 1st Century Rome, like the Rise of the Emperors because they were all nuts and it’s really engaging, there’s no such thing as boring Roman Imperial History like, there’s, there’s always somebody who’s like killing senators with a hail of rose petals or like, murdering somebody with a plum in the Colosseum. And, and these are not examples that I’ve made up, they’re real. Um, so, so I would quite like to visit that. Um, but I feel like I just ping between past and future and near past and it’s, like it’s, it’s an absolute nightmare for my agent who’s been very patient with the whole thing and has managed to not kill me with a stick yet which I am really grateful for. Um, but yeah I think maybe and if I do another historical fiction novel, it will be something Romany, which will be really fun for me.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah I’m going to enjoy that, I can’t wait. Anyone else in the room? Can you pass it to the lady.
Audience
Oh so sorry.
Audience
Hello.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Hello.
Audience
Um I found myself very hungry reading this book for all the food you were describing.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Yes.
Audience
You mentioned that you sometimes go a bit methods, did you bake any honey cakes and things like that to sort of sample them and see what they were like?
Natasha Pulley
Author
Do you know, there’s a wonderful YouTube channel run by a guy who actually recreates ancient recipes and there’s like there’s this great Roman recipe for a thing that’s kind of like a churro but like curly and it’s really nice um, so you can sometimes reconstruct this stuff um, I got a bit obsessed with honey because Dionysus um, being the God of Wine, weirdly is also the God of Honey because the first wine was fermented honey water um, he’s also the God of Bees for the same reason. So every, everything was like mead and honey cakes for a long time and now I’m a little bit obsessed with honey so yeah, but, but also I think food is really important for getting a sense of what somebody’s daily life is like. Like what, if this is the food in your day, what are you looking forward to because I don’t know about you but like I’m a normal person and what I look forward to most is dinner. Like never mind other humans in my life, what’s really important is chicken. Um, so it was really interesting to read accounts of what people were eating and, and how they were making this and, and this is even detailed in some Greek texts so like, this is what soldiers should eat and it’s amazingly close to the modern like you know, if you want to put on muscle you need to eat a lot of protein and that kind of, it’s really, you’re like, oh you knew, you knew 3000 years ago. It’s brilliant so I think for, for me, food is a really important part of world building.
Audience
Even just like you describing bread being dipped into olive oil, I was like that just sounds so delicious, something so simple. It was really hard reading this without eating.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Perhaps you should put together a tasting menu or something for…
Natasha Pulley
Author
It would be great to a Dionysus tasting menu. Yeah, there’s a reason why Phaedrus is always cooking um, so he’s always hungry because there’s no food um, and he’s always cooking. So yeah that was a great question.
Audience
Thank you.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Any other questions in the room or online?
Audience
I was just wondering um, when you were talking about the new ideas that you get and you’ll maybe get fixated on them and then decide to turn them into a novel. How does that work in your brain, are there multiple things going on at the same time where you’re picking up different influences or does it tend to be that one will come to you and then that’s it, that’s your project you know, for a while?
Natasha Pulley
Author
That’s a great question and it’s the, it’s option number 1. It’s always there are a few things going on at once. Um, and I think actually there are some writers who’d like throw vegetables at me for saying this um, but I think it is actually a good idea to do a couple of things at the same time. Um, because if you get kind of bored of one or blocked on one, this is really common, then you just flip to the other own. There’s always something to look forward to and there’s something like, you’ve got me on food now, there’s always something like really yummy and sweet to go to and so if you have two or three things on the go at once, there’s always this kind of lovely banquet of stuff to be thinking about whereas if you’re only on one, if that starts to go wrong, your mental health is going whistle explode sound. So it’s good for you as a writer to have several projects. On the other hand, I know some writers who would say like that’s absolutely the wrong thing to do, you should definitely focus on one so I can only tell you what works for my brain. If you’re a writer and I know that lots of people in this room will be writing because it’s such a common hobby to do, it’s one of the few creative things that you can do that’s free right, you don’t need to buy any paint, you don’t need to pay for a dance class, you can just sit down and write on the laptop that you’ve nicked from work. You feel seen, I know. Um, it’s really important to just listen to your own brain like, what works for you and when I say what works for you, I mean what makes you feel happy. That’s really important like, you shouldn’t be going oh my god I’ve got to do this. You should be running home to do it and that’s when you’ll write something that hopefully other people will like as well. Um, but yeah, option number one, always two or three things at various stages of non-development.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
So if we are, we’re talking about like your different stages, what stage are you at at the moment with your next pieces?
Natasha Pulley
Author
So the next book is called The Salt King and it is chronologically done which means I have a good first draft that my editor has seen and gone, that’s sufficient Pulley um, and it’s about 120,000 words long which I reckon is a bit overweight so I am going to try and cut it a little bit. But then I’ve also got something else that I haven’t mentioned to anybody or my agent yet which is about 40,000 words and something else that’s about 20,000 words. So that’s what I’m doing when I’m not editing the main thing and I think it’s really refreshing to be able to flit between them because it really depends on my mood.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah if you get bored you can just move on. Or that doesn’t work, I’ll do something on this yeah.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Exactly or sometimes you’ll have an idea and you’re like, oh my god that’s great but it doesn’t work in this one, it’s going to go in this one.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Natasha Pulley
Author
And it’s a way to make sure you’re not wasting you know, your moments of genius which we all have.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Any more questions in the room? Yep.
Audience
Hi there.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Hey.
Audience
Um, how do you um, marry or balance the creative pursuit of writing and the commercial imperative of selling novels because they feel like two competing things going on?
Natasha Pulley
Author
I, you’re completely right and they are competing often to the point of feeling as if they’re mutually exclusive. So sometimes you go, okay well surely the right thing is to stay faithful to creatively what I want to do but at the same time, you know romanticy is doing really well and if you can write a bonk buster about dragons you’d make a lot of money right. Rather than you know, like everybody is non binary on Mars which is never going to be a commercial book success. Um, so these things they, they do feel like they’re at logger heads. Um, what I would say is that this for me is the real strength of being traditionally published rather than self-published. If you have a traditional publisher, you are surrounded by people who at least in theory their job is to help you do well and to help this book do well which means that at least you personally don’t have to be great at social media, you don’t have to have 10,000 followers in TikTok or Instagram or any of the rest of it because you’re under the umbrella of this organisation that spends a significant amount of it’s time and resources doing those things for you. Um, so I think that really, really helps and if you are traditionally published, you can afford to be a little bit precious and say, but you know creatively I don’t want to write a dragon bonk buster actually and you just, you seem like a terrible snob but you will be happier in your life. Um, when it comes to doing events like this, a lot of writers um, struggle with it because this is a profession that almost requires you to be a bit of a dorky introvert um, you have to just sit at your kitchen table and do it for 99% of the time. And then 1% of the time you have to turn into a person who is okay at public speaking and lots of people struggle with that um, so it’s a very weird job I would say. A very strange job and all those things that seem conflicting absolutely are um, but I kind of really like that it’s that varied. I like that I get to sit at my kitchen table in my pyjamas and write stuff but then I love coming to places like this and talking to people like you and I never know who I’m going to meet. Um I was at one event once and I was. I was chairing for somebody else and a girl who looked like she was about 12 years old in the audience came up to me and said, hi, I’m Rebecca – she was American but I can’t do an American accent – but imagine, imagine a small, petite Asian American woman who looks 12. I’m Rebecca, I’ve written four novels already and I was almost like, pat, pat, pat of course you have darling, well done, well done. Five years later I was like that was Rebecca Kuang who wrote Babel. And then I chaired an event for her with 400 people in it, not very long after that conversation um, so you never know who you are going to meet, you never know who’s in the audience and just humans are great and I really like this, so I like both sides of it, it’s a. it’s a really good job, I recommend it to everybody.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
One thing we haven’t really talked about is um, your work as like a lecturer teaching other people how to, how to be novelists. How did you kind of move into that space?
Natasha Pulley
Author
So um, it was quite strange. I was living in Peru and, as one does, and I was doing a final research for a book that I wrote that’s set in Peru um, and I saw this like really rubbish job come up online um, on a website that’s about like creative writing jobs and it was this like really, really fractional job teaching at Bath Spa University, like teaching on one module for like half a day a week um but I had no plans for after Peru. I was like, I don’t know how old I was, I was like 26 and I was going to be imminently unemployed and I was just like, I can’t just sit at a table and write all the time like you will go mad. Like so, if you do that you live in eternal lockdown right, like you just go more and more insane and then after four months your mother visits and goes, you don’t look well. And I was like I need to go and do something, but I’m not qualified to do anything because I’ve only wrote books um so I felt really dumb but there was this tiny job at Bath Spa and I was, I think I was only one of like two people who interviewed for it and yay, there were two positions so I got on the Wi-Fi at Starbucks in Lima and spoke to this beleaguered lady at Bath Spa who was like, can you please teach 18 year olds genre fiction. I was like, yeah I can do that. And then, so I moved from Lima to Bath.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Quite the move.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Yeah and, and that’s what I did and, and now I teach a lot more um, I teach three days at university and then I sit at home for, for two days but really four days because writers don’t know what weekends are.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Sure.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Um, and it’s great. It’s great.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
I was about to say, how do you find it but that’s good that it’s great yeah.
Natasha Pulley
Author
It, it’s fantastic. One, one of the things that I really love about teaching undergraduates is that I’m overlapping with people who are now the generation down from me which is amazing and I’m starting to realise why, when I was 21 people who are the age that I am now seemed really old. It’s because they never spoke to anyone who was 21. Whereas if you speak to someone who is like, actually most of the humans who I know are 21, and so it’s just, it’s delightful because what I find with every year that goes past, and I’ve been teaching for about ten years now, there will be people who have radically different views about the same text that I’ve been teaching year after year after year. The same techniques, the same ideas and it’s never boring like, you can teach the same curriculum for ten years and you’ll never get bored of it because the response to it is wildly different, year on academic year. So it’s just really joyful and I love them and honestly like people who are 21 are some of my favourite people because they are hilarious and wise and talented and um, it’s really difficult because I know that only a small proportion of them will ever actually be published but I try and make it my business to make sure that they can be published if they want to be. And that’s all you can do.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
This is probably like the most clichéd question but of those hopeful 21 year olds, what’s your sort of key piece of advice if you could distil it down into one thing?
Natasha Pulley
Author
Just read. Read and read and read and read because if you don’t read you’re never going to be able to write well. It’s like saying that you want to be an artist but you’ve never been in a gallery. It’s the same like you need to understand the thing that you’re making and one of the things that I often see with people who say they want to be writers, the things that they are responding to are only ever movies or games and I am like, great so why aren’t you writing scripts, why aren’t you writing for a games designed, why do you want to write a novel when you’re not reading novels. So know your craft basically and it, it is a craft, it’s the same as being a carpenter, putting together a table. There is a way to make something kind of look novel shaped but you need to imbibe enough novels to know what that shape is. So read, just read and read and read and if you’re a really good reader, you will I guarantee become a really good writer.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Ah it’s good advice. Um were there any more questions in the room or online? We have a few more minutes.
Mishcon Online
Yes there’s one online and that is, how have your research trips to China, Japan and Peru influenced your work? Do you think your experience abroad resonates with an international audience?
Natasha Pulley
Author
So, there’s two parts to that question. One, how has it influenced my work um, one of the things that I really try and do if I am writing about a culture that is away from mine is I try and go and live there. And I really try and learn the language because I love languages as you can tell, massive nerd um, get on really well with it and every time you learn a language it gets easier I promise.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
How many languages are we on now then?
Natasha Pulley
Author
Six.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Okay wow that’s impressive.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Um but you know, I can’t speak any of them anymore um, it’s, I used to speak six languages, let me rephrase it. Um, so it has a huge influence and I go and do that in order that it influences the work because honestly some you know, now, I’m middle class now, it’s awful. I grew up like properly working class and I was like really proud of it and, and you know, and now completely disqualified. I’m middle class and go to Waitrose…
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Me too.
Natasha Pulley
Author
…and Marks and Spencer, it’s disgusting. Anyway like just the view of some middle class lady from England about 19th Century Japan is not going to be worth anything, like why would anyone read that um, unless you know something that other people don’t you know, so go away and do the thing. Talk to the people who you are writing about and that’s why I was living in Peru, I was learning Spanish in Lima and then I went travelling and I was very annoying for indigenous Quechua people in Cuzco, I’d run around after them saying things like, please can you tell me about your conception of linear time and an amazing number of people were like, okay. Um, but it’s really important to do that because the whole point is to let yourself be influenced by the experiences you are having, broadening your horizons, try and broaden your point of view and remember that the culture that you are writing from is a historical blip that doesn’t matter so a big view is really good. Do I think that these books will or do have any international influence. Probably not because I am just some person from East Anglia and I don’t matter and my books don’t matter. Um, but I really hope that some people who are not exactly from where I’m from will like. That would make me really, really happy um I know that Watchmaker of Filigree Street did weirdly well in Venice. Why? I, I don’t know but it happened and that was great. I still don’t know why, I don’t speak Italian.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
They just really love clockwork in Venice.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Yeah and it’s not set in Italy or anything. I don’t know. But see you can often never tell when something will chime with different cultures. You can never tell when your advance in the UK will be really low but for some reason Brazil loves it. Like, it, it’s such a strange field and there’s so much to know that you can never know it all. You can just sort of try and approach it in what you hope is a sensible way and hope for the best.
Georgia Humphrey
Senior Social Media Executive, Mishcon de Reya
Okay that’s one of my questions and we are right on time so thank you very much to Natasha it’s been wonderful.
Natasha Pulley
Author
Thank you.
[Applause]