Maria gives a lengthy interview to the Australian newspaper The Age, in advance of her scheduled appearance at the Melbourne Writers Festival in August.
Here’s an extract from the interview, which can be read in full online:
Yet “lying” is part of the writer’s craft, surely fundamental to making fiction?
“Yes, it’s the art of persuasive lying. The writer shouldn’t be in the room. Writerly writing and showing off I can’t abide. Writing fiction and telling lies are interrelated.”
This is How is a prime example of the art – and of the writer staying firmly in the background, while bringing the world into blazing focus on the page, and achieving what Hyland calls “The ultimate lie – that I know another mind!
“Patrick Oxtoby,” she says, “is awfully ordinary. Yet there’s no such thing as ordinary.” She pauses again, but this time not for effect, then adds: “And it takes a novel to prove that.”
