Author Interview: Jonathan Gorvett
Q&A with the contributors from the latest issue of Hinterland - and a date for our next First Steps taster day.
Jonathan Gorvett is a freelance journalist and editor by profession who, after living and working for many years in Turkey, Cyprus and the wider Middle East, currently circulates between Ireland and Spain. His work has been published twice in Hinterland: ‘The Plague Museum’ appeared in Issue 13 and ‘A Book of the Dead’ appears in Issue 17.
What’s the last thing (except for this!) that you wrote?
A ‘to do’ list prior to catching the Rosslare-Bilbao ferry. Items include ‘pack egg flipper’ (so difficult to find a good one) and ‘deal with spiders’. Suffice to say that one of those two items is absurdly aspirational, while my tortillas de patatas are about to improve considerably.
What’s a recent discovery that you can’t keep quiet about?
The International Surrealist Exhibition held in London in 1936. Salvador Dali nearly asphyxiating in a diving suit, Dylan Thomas offering visitors cups of string, Hugh Sykes Davis in an argument over a herring, a rose-headed Sheila Legge standing in Trafalgar Square holding a pork chop and the British tabloids going apoplectic — what’s not to like?
Words to live by…
‘I believe that the moment is near when the procedure of paranoiac thought will make it possible to systematise confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.’ Salvador Dali in 1930, life in 2026.
Tell us something about yourself that surprises people...
I look nothing like my brother.
What’s your piece in this issue about?
‘A Book of the Dead’ is about commemoration, history and contemporary politics, told through multiple voices, as well as my own. What inspired it was what André Breton (yes, I really can’t keep quiet about that exhibition!) described as a hasard objectif — objective chance — a coincidence that seems it can’t just be coincidence anymore. In this case, the chances ranged from a randomly picked up poem to an invitation and a journey, and ended in the freezing cold on a hill somewhere in Aragon (also the surname, of course, of Breton’s collaborator and co-founder of French surrealism…).
Thanks Jonathan! In other news, we’ve just opened booking for our next First Steps online course on 21st March, our popular taster day for those of you curious about writing non-fiction. We’ve still got spaces on the next run of our Building Skills and Advanced Skills courses after Easter too, and have added a new date for our Writers’ Workshop class for works in progress starting at the end of March. You can book direct with us, and if you do you’ll receive a free digital issue of your choice.