 Yn ymddych chi'n gweithio. Felly, ydych chi'n glas yng Nghymru, ac rwy'n gweithio i'n gweithio'r Llyfrgell i'r llyfrgell yn cymdeithasol. Rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'r llyfrgell yma, yng Nghymru'r Llyfrgell, a'r llyfrgell Tracey Chevalier, Nickita Lallewani a Stephanie Scott. Rwy'n gweithio'r gweithio'r llyfrgell, ymddych chi'n gweithio'r llyfrgell a'r llyfrgell yma i'r llyfrgell sydd wedi'u ari ac yn cyffredinol y cyfrifbryd yma i chi'n gweithio yma yng Nghymru Llyfrgell, ymddych chi'n gweithio'r llyfrgell a'r llyfrgell yn cymerin a gyfer cyfrifbryd a'r llyfrgell i gyrdyn ni o ddweud ac yn cyfrifbryd a'r llyfrgell i gweithio gyfrifbryd roedd eu cyfrifbryd yn y meid iawn ynmateb o'r llyfrgell i'r llyfrgell. Roedd y gweithio'r llyfrgell yma ymddych chi'n gweithio yn ysgolwyddoedd ar Ysgolwyddon panchro sydd yn Llywodraeth, y cyfnod ymgyrch yn ysgolwyddon a'r newydd, y newydd o'r ysgolwyddon, a'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod o'r cyflwyno yn yllanol y Llywodraeth ac yn ysgolwyddon ymgyrch yn ysgolwyddon yma. Mae'r gweithio'n gweithio'r cyflwyno'r hynny yn ysgolwyddon, mae'n fwylltio'n ddod i'r cyfnod ysgolwyddon. Mae Lywodraeth yn rhoi isgwyddoedd yn pobl yn ysgolwyddon hynny yno yn ysgolwyddon, bydd wedi cael ei fanlun o amlunol yn ysgolwyddon. Ysgolwyddon os rwyf yn ein sylfaen o'r bynd o'r Llywodraeth, oherwydd o'n iddynt ysgolwyddon a'r cyfr smoothly sy'n ysgolwyddon ac'r Cyfnod Ysgolwyddon a'r Cyfrwyno Cymraeg ac mae wedi sgolwyddon i ffinell o'r gyfrwyno. Rydym wedi bod arun yn canolwyr o'r eventau yma i gafodd o'r ffaith yma ar y Llyfrgell Llyfrgell. Rydym wedi cyfnodod ar gyda Chymru ar SNF19, a hynny ydych chi'n rhai bod ydych yn ddodfodol yma i'r lluniau fe wnaethol thoseau ac chi mae hyn ar которыйdd yma iddo yn llyfrgell a dipynnol. Mae roedd yn gweithio cyfans yma yn llyfrgell er mwyn – unrhyw ngrych ar gyfer Llyfrgell Gwyrd i'r Llyfrgell i Loes i Yorkshire. Y Llywodraeth Rheiddiol yw'r ysgol yw'r Llywodraeth Brysyll Llywodraeth ar y llyfr yw'r cyfrach sy'n cyfrach ar Bostan yn ysgrifennu Gweithreidio ar y Llywodraeth yn 50 oes, ac yn ymolod yn 70% o'r llwyr yng ngynghwm. Felly, mae'n gweithio'r cyfrach o gyfrach o'r cyfrach yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch, sy'n gweithio'r gilydd ei bod yn fawr arfer o'r cyfrach sy'n gweithio'r cyfrach? Felly byddwn ni'n siarad diogel yn gweithnodol ac yw'r cyfrach sy'n gweithio'r cyfrach sy'n gweithio'r cyfrach sy'n gynhyrchu'r cyfrach? Rydyn ni'n gweithio teithio'r cyfrach ar鎤 ac eu bod nhw i'n ffordd i'n cyfrach yr ent. Felly, rodo'n frydym i'n dyn nhw Andrew Ellison, y ciflifarion cyfrach y Llywodraeth. Iebydd eich bwysig, Lystaf, i roeddaeth i chi'n holl gwaith o fyMyll Gwyrdd Llywodraeth, ac os ydych yn dweud ein bod nhw'n byd yn ymddangos i gael ein allan o hynny o fynd ymddangos yterfyniadau. Yn bod efallai maen nhw'n cyflei'r Llywodraeth hafbro i gyda'r ymddangos a l無 amser o'r gofynidol hefyd yn ddiwys a'r cyflei'r Llywodraeth. Rwy'n gweithio'r Llywodraeth yn unrhywgrodd i'r colegol, ac mae Llywodraeth Gweithio'r Llywodraeth, rwy'n gweithio'r parwysau. Llywodraeth Gweithio'r Llywodraeth felly rydyn ni wedi ei wneud i'r cyfleoedd a'u cyfleoeddau. Mae'n cael eu cyflwyno i'r cyfleoedd i'r cyfrifoedd yng nghylch arnyn ni gael perthynas gysyllt. Leeds wedi cael ei bwysig o gweithio gweithio gweithio gyda'r fforddol, ac mae yna siŵt y bydd yma yma yn y cyfnod o gweithio'r gweithio gweithio, ond mae'r gweithio'r gweithio i fynd yn ymryd gan a'r hyn o'r hyn yn ddigon. Felly, y gweithio'r pwysig o'r prgynwyddon ar gyfer ymlaen i'r gyrdeithas hynny yn ysgrifftol o'r mae'r gwleid. Ond oes y gwirionedd. Mae'n cydwyr yn cychwyn ffordd yr adnoddiaeth. Mae'r adnoddiaeth, mae'r adnoddiaeth, os ydych chi'n gwirioneddau. Ond oes ymlaen i'ch gyfnodd iawn, fydd o'r cydwyr yn cydwyr. Ond oes mor oeddodd. Ond oes adnoddiaeth, oedd yn cymryd yn ymgyrchu. Ond oes eich adnoddiaeth yn cydwyr, os ymgyrch yn cydwyr. I had recently been to the Edinburgh Book Festival, and I had been lucky enough to see Tracy talking about her novel, A Single Thread. And it was when I was there at that event that I learnt that actually the archive which Tracy had used to research her novel was in fact based at the University of Leeds. And so it was this local connection, as well as the detail in which Tracy explores women's experiences in her novels, that we felt made her an ideal choice of speaker and were delighted that the British Library has been able to facilitate this for us. But tonight, not only are we joined by Tracy Chevalier, we're also joined by Nikita Lawani and Stephanie Scott, who will be talking and reading from their novels, before joining a panel discussing how the themes in their novels connect with the wider themes of unfinished business. So I'd just like to say thank you once again for joining us this evening. I very much hope you enjoyed the event, and I'm now going to hand over to our chair for the evening Yvette Holston. Thank you. Hello everyone. I'm really happy to be here and to welcome you to this event. I'm going to introduce our fantastic panel to start with. So first of all we have Tracy Chevalier, who was born in Washington DC and has been based in London since 1984. Tracy is a historical novelist, the author of 10 novels. Her first The Virgin Blue was published in 1997. Her breakthrough second novel, The Girl with the Pearl Earring, was published in 1999 and became an international bestseller. It sold over 5 million copies worldwide. It was made into an Oscar and BAFTA nominated film in 2003 starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth. Tracy's other novels include At the Edge of the Orchard, Remarkable Creatures and the Last Runaway, and her most recent A Single Thread, which we're talking about this evening, was published last year. Nikita Lalwani was born in Rajasthan and raised in Cardiff. Her debut novel gifted about a young girl maths prodigy, was published in 2007. She was listed for the Book of Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and won the Desmond Alley at Prize for Fiction. Her second novel, The Village, set in an open prison in rural India, came out in 2012 and won a Gerward Fiction Uncovered Award. Her third novel, You People, set in contemporary London, was published in April this year and it's already been optioned for television I think in the world production, The Creators of Line of Duty and the Bodyguard, so watch this space on that. Stephanie Scott is a Singaporean British writer who was born and raised in South East Asia. What's left of me is yours, published earlier this year, is her debut novel. She won the Gerward Arbonne Prize for Pros Fiction and the A.M. Heath Prize and was runner-up in the Bridport Prize, Peggy Chapman Andrews Award. What's left of me is yours has been listed by the Observer as one of its top 10 literary debuts for 2020, and I would agree with that. We'll be hearing from each of the authors who will be reading from and talking about their books and we'll also be discussing some of the wider themes of unfinished business, the fight for women's rights. There will be time for questions from you, the audience, and you can submit your questions in the question box below at any time during the course of the event and we will put selected questions to the panel towards the end. I would also just to mention that you can use the menu above to visit the library's bookshop, give us any feedback that you may have and also to make a donation. Right, so if we could start with you, Tracy. A single thread, fantastic novel, it's set in 1932. It explores one of the many kind of sad consequences of the losses of the First World War. And it deals with, I'll use this phrase, the surplus women, which is pretty unflattering, excuse me, unflattering phrase, but could you just explain to us first of all what what that means. It was a label that came up through the press newspapers in 1921, a census was taken in Britain, and it was discovered that there were almost 2 million more women than men as a result primarily of the losses during World War One. The newspapers jumped all over this and said, Oh, this is a disaster. It's going to be a social problem. These women are a problem. And their surplus surplus to requirement. So a lot of women who might have expected to marry weren't going to. And what were they going to do. This is a society that was set up for women, expecting that women would marry and have families. They had very little access to higher education, very little access to careers other than teaching, nursing, and being a clerk. And these didn't pay very well. So the women were the surplus women were reliant on their families to support them. And also they tended to live at home they often were expected to look after the parents as they grow older. And it was a pretty grim existence for unmarried women at that time. And when I read about this, I really wanted to create a character a heroin, who was a surplus woman who actually managed to create a an independent and happy life for herself. So we have this fantastic essential character who's called violet speed well, which is a brilliant name. And she is in her late 30s isn't she when we meet her she's 38 she's still grieving the loss of both her fiance and one of her brothers during the First World War. And she's been living with her, her parents in Southampton, as you say she'd be expected to just kind of stay there with with her parents. But after her father dies, she finds it very difficult to continue living with her very overbearing mother so she she makes this she she makes a bright decision. Yeah, yeah. The time of going to go and live in Winchester. And that was quite a courageous and fairly controversial thing to do, wouldn't it have been. Yes, yes. She was expected to look after her mother and she didn't. And the book explores in a way that that tension between duty and freedom. And, but no, she goes to Winchester, and she ends up joining of an embroidery group who are making cushions and kneelers for the for Winchester Cathedral. I've always wanted to write a cathedral novel and I was drawn to these cushions and kneelers that are still in existence there because when you walk into a cathedral like that you you everything you see, especially at an old cathedral. Everything you see has been made by men, the stained glass, the sculptures, the carvings, the tiles on the floor. The only thing we know in that cathedral is made by women was the cushions and kneelers and I think I was just naturally drawn to that to that and I decided to write about that group which made them in the 1930s. So, yeah, they were known as the Broderies of Winchester Cathedral and can you tell us a bit more about them because there is one of the people mentioned in the novel is actually a real life figure, isn't it? Yes, Louisa Paisel, and it was Louisa Paisel's work, her archive that has been has made its way to the textile department at the University of Leeds, so I spent a very happy day pawing through all these boxes of new notebooks and papers and lots and lots of embroidery. She was an embroidery expert at the turn of the century. She worked for the V&A, she taught embroidery abroad in Greece and she traveled a lot and she ended up, but she grew up in Bradford so she always had a northern connection and then she ended up in Winchester and organized this group of 180 women to make these incredibly beautiful and unusual cushions and kneelers for the choir stalls in the cathedral. So, yes, there's a whole boxes and boxes of stuff that I went through at the library in Leeds. The descriptions of the Winchester Cathedral, which you alluded to just a little earlier, I felt reading those passages are really transported to the place. Did you spend quite a lot of time in the cathedral? Yes, a lot, looking at the cushions, walking around, talking to people, and also the book is kind of balanced out between embroidery, which was very much a women's thing, there's only women who did it, and this other group that's connected to the cathedral bell ringers. So, and that was all male in the 1930s, and they kind of, I wanted to contrast the idea of women who were making cushions to bring comfort to worshippers, so they're bringing comfort to other people, whereas the bell ringers were ringing for themselves. When you talk to bell ringers, bell ringing is all about, it's not about making a melody, it's about a mathematical pattern, it's very difficult to do, and it was a challenge to the men, and they often, you'd ask, when I was doing research, I'd ask them, what do you think it sounds like to people out in Winchester hearing this, and they're like, oh, I don't know, we're just trying to get the pattern right. And I thought Violet Speedwell, when she encounters both groups and it's almost like she needs to recalibrate herself a bit, to take on not just this notion of bringing comfort to other people, but also doing things for herself, for the pleasure that it brings her, not necessarily to other people, so it was important for me to get both of those things in. Right. So Violet finds herself a pretty decent job, doesn't she, as a kind of typist in an insurance office in Winchester, but I mean the pay barely allows her to sort of cover her rent at the boarding house where she's living with other similar surplus women. And she has to make decisions like, you know, will I have dinner to the cinema or go to the cinema. So, and that I think was also a fairly common position for those women to be in, wasn't it? Yes, I read in my research, there's a wonderful book by Virginia Nicholson called Singled Out, which is about single women in the 20s and 30s. And she quotes lots of, and she quotes a lot of manuals for these single women, like be a single woman and love it kind of thing. And they were, I had a, I sat in the British Library reading through quite a few of these. And I found them such depressing reading because actually underneath it all I was trying to be very, very cheerful about the idea of being a single woman with not very much money and the things that you should have in your cupboard and how you can save money on, washing by hand washing and various things. And it was actually incredibly depressing because underneath it all is this undertow of really you want to find yourself a man, if you can. Any man will do and get married because that's actually going to make you a lot happier than washing your stockings in the sink. So it was very, it was kind of undermining itself the whole time, but I used a lot of that information to create Violet's Daily Life, which did involve eating fish paste and boiled eggs and sometimes not eating in order to go to the cinema. Exactly. So that's, I think this kind of fairly neatly kind of leads us into the reading that you've selected or the passage that you've selected because it is very much about money. And Violet approaches her boss with a request because she is struggling. Yes. So the scene I'm reading, Violet's going to see her boss. There were three typists, one left because when you get married, you left. And it wasn't the law, but at that time women did, if they married, they were just expected that they would leave their job. And so there's a vacancy and Violet has an idea. And that's just to her boss, Mr, Mr, here we go, we're getting that, Mr Waterman. Violet fortified herself with a tea biscuit, then went to speak to Mr Waterman. When she knocked on his open door, he was gazing out of the window at the rain. Hello, Miss Speedwell. I was just admiring the rain. The garden needs it. What can I do for you? Is that a cup of tea you've brought me? Just the ticket, thank you. I have a suggestion to make about the vacancy for a typist, Violet said. You do? Mr Waterman made no attempt to hide his astonishment. A astonishment tinged with disapproval. She would have to hurry to lay out her plan before his annoyance at this female temerity shut down the conversation. I was going to suggest that Miss Webster and I handle some of the extra work between ourselves. If I take a shorter lunch break of just half an hour and work an extra hour on the weekdays, that's seven and a half hours a week more. You would do that. You would really work more hours for southern counties insurance. Mr Waterman's gratitude alarmed her. Clearly he had misunderstood a crucial element. Of course I would be glad for the rise in pay she rejoined. Very glad. It is not easy for a single girl to live on my current salary. The rise in pay? Mr Waterman wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. Violet could have said, of course foolish man. Why would I do more work for no pay? Do you know what I eat for lunch? That I never have a hot meal? That my clothes hang off me because I've lost weight and I can't afford to buy new? That I either eat or go to the cinema? That I have no pension and no husband to keep me and my savings are being decimated? That I often wonder what will happen when I'm too old to work? She said none of those things to Mr Waterman. It will save southern counties money in the long run, she explained, not having to pay a third typus full salary. Yes, I suppose that's true, Mr Waterman conceded after a moment. The tide of his disapproval was slowly diminishing. It rose again when she suggested her and Maureen's salaries increased by four shillings a week each, and remained high as she patiently took him through the numbers and explained her calculations. You've clearly given this some thought, Miss Speedwell, he muttered, obviously displeased with the idea. But when Violet reminded him several times that there would be a saving of a salary, he reluctantly agreed to set forth the solution to his seniors in Southampton. But, Miss Speedwell, I shall say this idea came from me, if you don't mind. I can't think what management would say to a girl having such a progressive idea. Violet did not expect a response for some time, reasoning it would take Mr Waterman a week or two to come round to the idea and in a sense make it his own. She didn't mind if he did so as long as she got a pay rise. So she was surprised when two days later he appeared in their office while she and Maureen were typing and announced that Southampton had agreed they could take on the extra work as a trial run for a month. With an additional four shillings a week, Violet felt she had to ask, yes, yes, Miss Speedwell with the additional four shillings. Mr Waterman looked weary, as if imagining he might have to feel the sort of demand from his wife or daughter. After he left, they continued to type in silence, but when Violet glanced over, Maureen was smiling. That's great. Fantastic negotiating skills there, I think. Tracy, you've said that you write about ordinary women from the past who perform small acts of rebellion that build into revolutions, which, and you can see that beautifully played out in this novel. You can see how violence confidence kind of grows throughout the novel and some of her small acts of rebellion. Trying to find, have a romantic life for those women was very difficult, wasn't it? So can you tell us a little bit about this sort of slightly transgressive relationship that kind of builds up between Violet and one of the bell ringers who you mentioned earlier called Arthur? Arthur Knight is one of the bell ringers, and she gets to know him very slowly. They become friends, but there's an undertow of a current of attraction between them, but he's married. And so it's always a supportive relationship, and he's very much the moral compass of the book, he and Louisa Paisel. Arthur has an understanding. One of the difficulties of writing a novel that's set between the wars is that I know and you readers know that World War II is coming, but they don't know. They don't call it World War I because they don't know there's going to be a second one. They just called it the Great War. They couldn't imagine there was going to be another war after all that they had been through. And for me, it was really difficult to put on the brakes and not give them too much foreign knowledge of what was what was going to happen. On the other hand, the book takes place in the early 30s in 1933 Hitler comes to power, he becomes chancellor of Germany, and that's right smack in the middle of the book and I thought I can't let this go unnoticed. And there's another reason why it can't go unnoticed, which I don't want to go into because it's a spoiler, but there's something on those cushions and dealers that's really surprising, which I discovered when I was in Leeds going through the archive of Louisa Paisel's stuff. She's to make models of what the women would embroider. So she'd make a model and then give it to them and they'd copy it and I one of these one of these models I practically shrieked when I saw it and that changed the nature of some of the book and it meant that I wanted there to be one character who actually had some sense of what was going on who had the uneasiness about what was happening on the continent and in Germany and that's Arthur so apart from being violet support he also opens her up to the wider world and thinking about her place in the world and what's going on in the world and how it affects her. So he has a very important place in the book. I think that event has frozen so I'm maybe not. Are you there event. I'm back now I just did drop out so I caught the end of what you were saying there that after being a very important character in the book. I think he's away from him, you know that he could see what was coming in a way in a sense and what was happening in Europe so. I think I think in a way he's important because he teaches violet to be not to be more like a man that's really a crude way of putting it but but to think for herself to not be not to be oppressed by the the the position that she's meant to the things that she's meant to do the kind of life she's meant to have so just one small example when she meets him at a pub at one point and she looks around all the women are drinking she doesn't want to drink sherry there doesn't seem quite right that's what she's used to drinking. The other women are drinking other, you know, lemon and different types of drinks but Arthur offers to get her up a half of avail of the local ale and and that she's the only woman in the pub is drinking that but it doesn't occur to him. He feels like why shouldn't a woman drink a pint even a pint if she wants to so it's he's much more open minded and open to the world and to what she can be in it and it helps her to become more independent. Okay. There's just one that's a key sequence which kind of ties in with again the themes, the wider themes that we might be discussing later but also into events in the books of Stephanie and Nikita as well which is the vulnerability of a woman on her own. I know what you're referring to. You know Violet tries to, yeah, so she tries to do things so she goes out walking in the countryside, which should be a pleasurable experience but if you just talk us through what happens to her. Yes, she goes on holiday on her own on a walking holiday there's a wonderful path between Winchester Cathedral and Salisbury Cathedral and she walks along it. It's called the Clarendon Way you can do it 26 miles and she's a little nervous about going on her own and then she starts to enjoy it and then unfortunately meets a man on his own and in the field and that is not great and she it's interesting because when I was researching that I walked I decided to walk it myself actually my husband and I were going to go for a weekend and then one or the other of us got ill. So we had to cancel it and the following weekend I could go but he couldn't and I thought well I'll go on my own. I kept putting off making the reservation for the been breakfast because I just, I just thought I really, I don't really feel safe, you know, almost 80 years later, 80 years after what happened what I create happening to Violet. I felt myself that we have changed so much and in from 1932 and now there are many more opportunities for women there's higher education there are all sorts of careers are open to us we're not expected to marry. But we still don't feel safe walking through field on our own. And that really surprised me when it came home to me that I didn't want to do it myself so I waited until we both could and I went with him. And, and I've talked to women since who said, yes, it's very hard to walk alone in the countryside. Well, thanks Tracy. I think we'll move on now to Nikita, but thank you. And I hope that's given everybody a flavor of this wonderful novel which I would highly recommend. I recommend all these novels. I think they're all brilliant. So, so if we can move on to Nikita. So you people, it's a, it's a kind of modern day morality tale set in contemporary London. I think it's 2000, early 2000s, so 2003 in a seemingly ordinary Italian restaurant called the Pizzaria Vesuvio, which is actually quite extraordinary. I mean, it's a melting pot of lots of different people of different nationalities and backgrounds. So can you tell, tell us a little bit more about the backgrounds to the novel and what inspired you to write it behind the story and why that setting? Well, I used to frequent a place that's a bit like the studio in the book. And I think that sort of being in that place made me think about lots of questions or, I guess, moral kind of points. That didn't have a direct answer that didn't have a simple answer. And that usually, for me, is the beginning of thinking about how to write a book in order to try and answer something that doesn't present itself immediately. So, I mean, in the novel, the studio is divided by front of house and what's happening in the back in the kitchen. So in the front of house, you've got European waitresses who are seemingly Spanish, Welsh, Indian mix. There's someone from Georgia in a restaurant down the road. And then in the back of the restaurant, you've got the Sri Lankan cooks, many of whom are officially not that they don't have legal status. And this boundary between legal and illegal is sort of there in the front and back of Vesuvio. The thing around, and it's going, blurring the boundaries and going from front to back is the proprietor, truly, who's a character who's sort of playing God with all of the people who come to the restaurant for help. So it's known as a place that you can go for help. You can go there for legal aid. You can go there for money. You need help with housing, food, loneliness, or just for conversation. But all of those different requests for help take place upstairs, which is a sort of no-go area. And so some of this was happening at the restaurant that I used to visit. But as with all fiction, it's grown to accommodate the more exciting thriller-ish elements in this case that sort of a plot like that lends, you know, the situation like that lends to you. And the character that he was investigating or trying to understand the place is called Nia, and she come from Wales and is of mixed race, and she's sort of fascinated with Julie. The proprietor doesn't know if it's a romantic fascination or if she actually wants to be him, and her fascination with him and what he's doing and how he's making moral choices all the time is what propels you through the book. I think you've chosen a really lovely scene from quite near the beginning of the novel, which kind of gives us a lovely picture of what the restaurant is like. It feels like it's a really interesting place. So perhaps if you could read that for us, that would be great. Great. So this is from the point of view of Nia. The chapters actually alternate between the point of view of Nia and of Sean, who is one of the Sri Lankan cooks who's fleeing the Sri Lankan Civil War in the back. This is from her point of view. She stared at everything and everyone in the beginning, ignoring the veneer of detachment that protected other commuters in the mornings. It was the summer of 2003 when Nia joined the restaurant, and that particular part of South West London was just beginning to gear up for gentrification. You could see the bankers, male and female alike, dipping their toes in, walking past the burger joints and chicken shops with appraising gazes, bodies taught with the effort of remaining open minded, tentatively making it down to the imposing residential squares they had heard about and staring up at the red brick and stucco mansion blocks and sliding timber sash windows. They would go up to the hushed communal gardens that lay at the centre of these squares and lean on the railings, not worried by the locked gates that always caught her out. Instead, they seemed to be practising for a lifestyle that appeared to be entirely up to them. She saw them on her way to and from the restaurant and marveled at this idea radiating out from them that the responsibility of shaping a life was all down to the choices you might make. They seemed full to bursting with choices. She had loved the place instantly. In fact, she loved the whole process, walking from the tube, turning down a small road, past a greasy spoon, the betting place, the Australian pub on the corner, till she was right there, standing at the panelled glass doors and looking up at Pizzeria Vesuvio. Each word hammered in gold and angled to form two sharp mountain slopes. They were warm days at the start of that summer, and these huge baroque capitals would be flashing with reflected sunlight against a vermillion background, whilst underneath you had all the offerings in a humble white font. Café, restaurant, pizza, pasta, Vesuvio, your home from home. Inside the space was laid out pretty traditionally, 20 small square tables on the ground floor with the till, cantering wine racks at the back near the kitchen, the affinous white tablecloths, small accordions of folded paper printed with photos of diners and the splashy headline. Welcome to the magic of Vesuvio. One candle per table, along with single stems in water, a pink rose, or carnation usually, a spiral staircase at the front led up to a function room, with the bar at one end and leather sofas at the other. This was the area where Julie entertained guests, unless it was hired out for a private party, but also where the staff mostly had their meals between shifts. Some of the Sri Lankan cooks lived above this first floor in a flat that Nia had heard about, and she'd witnessed them disappearing at the end of the night through another door near the bar. She'd watched them go through a dark portal into relative privacy, one or two guys at a time, catch a glimpse of an impossibly steep flight of stairs, register the knitted warmth of their mermas after the door was locked from the inside and they were no longer visible. There was something fascinating about the definitive way in which they sealed themselves off. They were different from her in that they had a clear end to the day, some place that they wanted to go when work was done, even if it was just upstairs. In contrast, she always lingered when her hours were through, unsure as to what she should do next. That's great, thank you. Sorry, can you? I think it cut out there, sorry. Who's a Tamil refugee who's fled the Civil War in Sri Lanka by paying traffickers to get him out of the country and leaving his wife and his young son behind. So, where did those two characters come from and why did you choose to tell a story from their points of view? Well, that's a really interesting question. When it started, I immediately began to investigate the mystery of Tully and therefore destroyed the mystery of Tully by going into his head. And I deflated all of the tension that you need for work to work and all of the desire to write it actually was kind of deflated in that instance. And I suddenly realised that I shouldn't go into Tully's point of view. So, in a sense, the two characters grew out of a desire for Tully to remain a mystery and for us to see him in two different ways. So, when we see him from the viewpoint of a 19-year-old mixed race waitress who looks white and looks Italian and therefore gets a job working in an Italian restaurant, but he's actually Indian to some degree and wants to understand the place. And then you see him from another person's point of view. Sean, the Sri Lankan cook who has, as you mentioned, fled torture and fled an incredibly traumatic background and has witnessed things that torment him and who is trying to find his family. There are two different forms of need going on in the book and that's quite an exciting pull in terms of reading. So, the Tully that you encounter in alternate chapters is slightly different depending on who's watching him and talking to him. He's different things to different people and that is quite an interesting dynamic, I think, in the book. So, that's why I did it that way, but the two characters, they grew up in, because they have different stages of need and there was this idea that one would get sucked into the other person's story and then come back out again with character A getting sucked back into character B's story, start with and then character B getting sucked back into character A's story. And this idea, for me, came from the fact that in London or in a city like London, we all rub up against each other and you encounter people from so many different backgrounds and then if you're in the same geographical space, the restaurant operates in this sort of square mile, everyone in that square mile around the restaurant can come there. Then you meet people who are from completely different backgrounds than you might otherwise. I think that's why those two characters grew, but it was Sean who came to me first because I was interested in that period when there was an influx of people from Sri Lanka into the UK in the early noughts. And what kind of research did you do around that? Because, you know, the whole, that sort of very insecure life that those people are leading and everything, you know, sort of living in the, kind of on the margins of society really, aren't they? I mean, there's a fantastic set piece which is like from a crime thriller or something, you know, when the immigration enforcement officers raid the restaurant. Did you speak to people who'd experienced that or just tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, for sure. Well, before I was a novelist, I did work as a documentary maker for a while and I still think that I'm using those same skills. When I write now, so I usually start with interviews. I talk to people who had experienced that very thing, style environment, restaurant raids that were taking place regularly during that time and that still take place obviously now. And I also talked to asylum lawyers, I talked to Freedom from Torture, the organisation, but there's a very complicated thing with interviewing people who've experienced torture and the actual interviewing of them with PTSD can bring the memories back. So it was a, I didn't do that, but I talked to people about the refugee experience for sure. And also my father was a refugee through the partition of India and that's very much a narrative that's in our family and that sort of turns up again and the idea of survival, family separation. There was a lot of that in the partition of India and obviously it's a very current thing right now. Family separation at borders, whether breaking the law is something that one should do in order to reunite families who've been separated. That's a big question, I guess, that preoccupied me when I was writing the book and fiction allows you to explore alternate answers for that, which, you know, which aren't legal, unlike life, I guess. Yes. I mean, that's what is really good on those grey areas, you know, which I, you know, it's very, very thought provoking because there are these huge moral choices that people have to make. And kind of what Shan and Nia have in common is that they suffer from a sort of survivor's guilt, I guess, because they've chosen to save themselves, haven't they? Yeah, they both have a survivor's guilt and also they discover what they have in common or that they both have a survivor's guilt, but they're also both sort of struggling in the vast kind of loneliness of London to just make it from day to day and week to week. And they're both hoping nothing will go drastically wrong because when you're living on the edge like that, if there's illness or if you get thrown out of your flat and bailiffs turn up, as happens with Shan, or if you run out of money and can't buy your travel card, you can't get to work. Being destitute is sort of very close and very present, and the restaurant provides them with a family of sorts, whilst they are estranged from the other, you know, the families that, you know, the more traditional ideas of the more traditional forms of family, filial and romantic and their children. So that's definitely a connecting force between them. I also wanted that grey area, there are all kinds of illegal things happening in the restaurant, you know, there's benefit fraud, cigarettes are being sold illegally. It's a place that you can go to apply for asylum and there can be a discussion about what will be the most successful way to apply for asylum. And the main character says, you know, it's about the greater good, you know, a few lies here and there are okay. It's the greater choice and the greater good is being adhered to. And at the end, when things become quite dramatic in the book, and it sort of tumbles into a different world really or a different realm of danger. Julie says, well, is it better not to try, you know, you're going to make some mistakes if you try to help and not just be a bystander, not just walk on by when somebody's in trouble. Does that mean you shouldn't try? Does that mean that you shouldn't force yourself to think about people's circumstances and whether they need help, that person on the street that needs help, that person who's been separated from their family and needs help getting them over. So that's deliberately muddy, I think. I like the reader to be engaged in the process of trying to work out what they think. And, you know, in an ideal world, different readers who discuss it would have different opinions. There's not a sort of didactic element to the book, I hope. No, not at all. It's extremely thought provoking and it has those different layers. And it's also, you know, while it doesn't pull any punches and, you know, it deals with very difficult issues. In the end, I found it uplifting in the sense that it shows you how to be kind, you know, which I think is a really important message, especially at the moment. That's great. Thank you, Nikita. If we can now move on to Stephanie. Hello, Stephanie. Thanks for waiting. So, your book. You say in your acknowledgments that the novel was inspired by a real life trial in Japan in 2010 in which a woman was murdered by a so-called now I'm not going to be able to say this. I'm not going to correct me, but it's a waka rasasaya. Very close. Okay. That's a person who's hired by a husband or wife to seduce their spouse in order to gain the advantage in divorce proceedings. So can you tell us a little bit more about that case and why and how it inspired you to write your novel? Well, the novel is a work of fiction, so it's loosely inspired by that case, but what occurred, there was a murder that occurred in 2010, and there the husband hired a waka rasasaya agent to seduce his wife and provide him with grounds for divorce. Only the agent fell in love with his target and the target fell in love with him in turn, and she was later murdered. And so the novel really revolves around all of the different kinds of love that exists, what love means to each of us individually, but also what we are capable of doing to each other for love, how we love, is it possible to love someone and kill them. And that's really where the novel began. And my story begins with Simico, a young woman, a newly qualified lawyer, who grows up never truly knowing how her mother died until one day that changes. And so she is drawn into the past narrative, this love triangle, and she goes in search of the truth of what really happened to her mother. Right, yes. So, I think, as you say, you mentioned, sorry, I lost you for a little bit there, but she has been told by her grandfather that her mother died in a car crash, so that's the story that she's been told. And then something, well, perhaps if you could do the reading that you've chosen, because that kind of sets things up about, you know, where Simico is and where she's going with what she's found out. Yep. No, you're right. She grows up never knowing how her mother truly died and one day that changes. And she goes in search of the truth. So, what I know. I was raised by my grandfather, Yoshi Sarashima. I lived with him in a white house in Makuro, Tokyo. In the evenings he would read to me. He told me every story about my own. My grandfather was a lawyer. He was careful in his speech. Even when we were alone together in his study, and I would sit on his lap. Even then, he had a precision with words. I have kept faith with that precision to this day. Grandpa read everything to me. Meshima, Sart, Dumar, Tolstoy, Basho, tales of his youth duck hunting in Shimoda, and one book, The Trial, that became my favourite. It begins like this. Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K. When we read that line for the first time, grandpa explained that the story was a translation. I was 12 years old, stretching out my fingers for a world beyond my own, and I reached out then to the yellowed page, stroking the written characters that spoke of something new. I read the opening aloud, summoning the figure of Joseph, a lonely man, a man people would tell lies about. When I grew older, I began to argue with grandpa about the trial. He told me other people thought over it too, over the translation of one word in particular, volumdat, to tell a lie. In some versions of the story, this word is translated as slander. Slander speaks of courts and accusations of public reckoning. It has none of the childhood resonance of telling lies. And yet, when I read this story for the first time, it was the translator's use of telling lies that fascinated me. Lies, when they are first told, have a shadow quality to them, a gossamer texture that can wrap around a life. They have that feather-light essence of childhood, and my childhood was built on lies. The summer before my mother died. When I look back on that time, those months hold a sense of finality for me, not because that was the last holiday my mother and I would take together, but because it is the site of my last true memory. Every year, as the August heat in Gulf Tokyo, my family piled their suitcases onto a local train and headed for the coast. We went to Shimoda. Father remained in the city to work, but grandpa came with us. Each time he would stop at the same kiosk in the station to buy frozen clementines for the train. And in the metallic heat of the carriage, Mama and I would wait impatiently for the fruit to soften so we could get at the pockets of sorbet within. Finally, when our chins were sticky with juice, Mama would turn to me in our little row of two and ask what I would like to do by the sea, just her and I alone. Forest sweeps over the hills above our house. I was not allowed up there alone as a child, and so when I looked at my mother on the train that summer, she knew immediately what I would ask for. In the afternoon's, Mama and I climbed high on the wooded slopes above our home, Washikura. We watched the tea fields as they darkened before autumn. We lay back on the rocky black soil and breathed in the sharp resin of the pines. Some days we heard the call of a sea eagle as it circled overhead. Grandpa knew the forest, but he never found us there. At four o'clock each afternoon, he would venture to the base of the hillside and call to us through the trees. I often heard him before Mama did, but I always waited for her signal to be quiet. On our last afternoon in the forest, I lay still, feeling the soft and steady puff of my mother's breath against my face. Her breathing quieted and slowed. I opened my eyes and stared at her at the dark lashes against her cheeks. I took in her pallor, her stillness. I heard my grandfather begin to call, his voice thin and distant. I snuggled closer, kissing her face, pushing through the coldness with my breath. Suddenly she smiled. Her eyes still closed and pressed a finger to her lips. We no longer own our home, Washikura, on the outskirts of Shimoda. Grandpa sold it many years ago. But when I go there today, climbing up through the undergrowth, I can feel my mother there beneath the trees. When I lie down on the ground, the pine needle sharp under my cheek, I imagine that the chill of the breeze is the stroke of her finger. Thank you. In a similar way to Nikita's novel, your stories, you have two perspectives. We hear from Sumiko and her voyage of discovery. We also have Reena, who is her mother and Katano's story, who was hired by Reena's husband to seduce her. Truth and lies are very much at the heart of the novel, aren't they? And there's a great quote which comes up time and again, which is, you know, the lies, of the lies that we're told, the very best ones are close to the truth. But that leads to, well, a tragedy, doesn't it? So can you first of all, I mean, you spent quite a lot of time, I think, in Japan researching the novel. So, and in particular, the Japanese legal system, because there's some very particular things about certainly around divorce that are quite different to what we might expect. So can you tell us a bit about that research and what you discovered? Sure. Well, this novel has been 10 years in the making. So I began it in 2010 and I travelled extensively in Japan and I worked with a number of lawyers in Tokyo who were very generous with their time and their expertise and really enabled me to do the kind of deep dive into the legal system that I wanted to do. Of course, even though the novel is told through the prism of Japanese history and culture, its exploration of love, relationships, divorce and the position of women has a much more global resonance that I hope every reader can relate to. And so what really interested me, I think, is that the number of the lawyers that I worked with, they were all women and they'd gone to the University of Tokyo, which is extremely hard to get into, and they were very much the minority. And I think the renowned women's studies professor Chizuko Aeno calls Japan's gender problem a human disaster. And she sort of speaks about how few women there are at today, particularly studying the law. So, I wanted to explore through Reena and Simiko how women can be constrained by society, how we can be trapped by society's expectations and that tension between societal expectations and personal desire. And so even though Reena, the mother, starts out at today studying law, she gets sucked back into her domestic roles, you know, that she's, she returns to the home, she's expected to marry well, she does. And so I really wanted to explore the parallel of her life and how she is constrained with society and then how Simiko 20 years later also deals with that, and how feminism is progressing in Japan today. Right. I mean, there's a lot at stake isn't there in the divorce proceedings because the kind of joints custody of children is illegal I think, is that still the case? It is, yes. Although they are currently undertaking a study to investigate whether joint custody might be possible. But currently only one parent is awarded sole custody of any children and this, this of course leads to many heartbreaking situations. And it's very, it's difficult as well because there are arguments for and against joint custody. Particularly, I think from women's rights activists, they worry that, you know, women will be unable to get away from abusive husbands. And they're unable to look after their children and be safe if joint custody were to be introduced. So there are really a lot of arguments on both sides, born against. The novel, it's a brilliant combination of crime thriller elements of it and then this very tender love story as well. So that's very fine balance that you've got there. Was that quite challenging to write? Yes, it was. I mean, I, I do love love stories and I'm very interested in romance narratives, how they unfold on the page, the expectations that are set up implicitly within them. So I think that was my literary passion really at the heart of it. And then the, the crime element, I really wanted to use that to create momentum to drive the narrative and, and also to, to propel the reader forward. I think it was very important to me with the crime story to really focus on the victim of the murder. I was, I'm very interested in violence against women and the proliferation of murders against women that seem to only be increasing in today's world. And what interested me was how so often the victim is forgotten and utterly defined, they become defined by their death and their lives are reduced down to that one event. And so what I wanted to do was really go back into Reena's life and Simaco does this in her search for her mother and really look at her as a, as a person and recover her history and give her the opportunity to, to live her own story, to write her own story. That's great. Well, thank you. Thank you for that, Stephanie. I think if we can, if I can bring you all together, the three of you now and just to have a little bit of a more general discussion and hopefully we might get some questions also from the audience. But I thought to start with just a question for your, all your, your books feature strong female lead characters. So I'm, well, Violet, Nia and Reena and Simaco actually. Would it be fair to say that they're all trying to take charge of their own destiny but they're in some way thwarted or hampered by society's expectations of them as, as women. Tracy, perhaps we could come back to you first with that. Sorry about that. In a way, that's where the drama lies for me. It's, it's, there's, if a woman already from writing about a woman and she already has her, her place she has power. Then there's nothing to write about, and particularly because I write about in historical settings. Women in the past, and now one could still argue, but I think we've come a long way, but women in the past had very little socio economic power and or political power. If I'm going to write about a woman in the past, she's often the powerless one. And, and the story is often about how she, there's a problem somewhere that she has to solve it's about herself or her place in the world and she has to, she has to resolve it in a way by somehow sneakily gaining some sort of purchase some sort of power for herself. A new place for herself. And, and that is always for me that's the dramatic story that I'm, I find myself telling over and over again, and particularly for women in the past who haven't been written about. So, the book I'm probably best known for is about a very famous painting girl in the pearl earring, and there's been loads written about Vermeer the painter, but nothing about the women in his paintings, we don't know who they are and and I wanted to change that by, by turning the turning the camera around turning it and putting it on the shoulder of someone else rather than the painter. And, and that's that felt important to me that that women's voices would be opened up in that way. Yes. Nikita. I think that, for me, Mia, she's a woman working in a restaurant in which there are a lot of men, and she's fascinated with a man and thinks she can be that man, and to some extent she's thinks she's sort of beyond sexual boundaries, and then a moment happens in the restaurant of extreme vulnerability. About halfway into the book where she is reminded of the fact that the same rules don't apply to the men in the restaurant as they, as due to her. The women in the restaurant are expected to flirt. It's an unspoken idea in the restaurant that part of the job description requires an element of flotation. Flotation leads to a very dark compromised moment for her when she leaves the restaurant, and there was no one to look after her so that illusion of being in a family and being cared for and being looked after by in the confines of the restaurant disappears once she goes down the dark alleyway around the restaurant. So in terms of agency, in terms of what a character can and can't do, as Tracy was saying, both in their lives and as a character in a book, that idea of being female and those boundaries, that was interesting to me, I think, in the book. But she's very much a gogetting sort of character. And she's, I think, you know, if you were to ask me what she thinks about her life and staring at people who are making choices, that's her desire, her desire is to create her own fate. And then she puts it to spread sunlight rather than darkness in the world and that's a very active desire, I guess that she has. I think. Stephanie, maybe. Hi. Yes, Stephanie, I think you better, I think you beth's frozen. Okay. Well, yes, as I was saying, the novel really revolves around the tension in societal expectations and personal desire and the roles that women are expected to fill, particularly in Japan where they are, where it's even now, it's still believed that the woman's role is primarily in the home, and that her focus should be on marriage and children. And I'm very interested in, I suppose, disruptive female narratives where women step beyond their roles. During my BA at York, I specialised in ancient Greek drama and Euripides as a lecturer was my favourite text studied there and that plays all about agency, it's all about a lecturer stepping out of her domestic roles, out of the person she's supposed to be and trying to find her own form of vengeance. And similarly, I think there are some amazing women writing about womanhood and again breaking down these traditional roles today so Sayaka Murata, Mieko Kawakami, Natsuo Kirino, these are my idols really and I'm very much writing into that tradition of questioning, you know, what women can do, what, you know, can they do what they want to do. And should they and how does that affect society if they do. I mean, obviously men are very constrained, can be very constrained socially as well, but it is the women who fascinate me. And so both Rena and Simaqo have their own struggles, their own personal desires and their own quests for agency. Just more generally just thinking about that, you know, obviously violence against women is very, you know, there's a huge major theme in your book, but it comes up, or potential violence that comes up in all three books. How far do you think we've come because that seems to be one of the areas where there hasn't been a huge great deal of improvement in terms of where we are today. Would you agree? Yes, I would say, you know, how far have we come not far enough. So it's very current. I think it depends on the country and part of the world. It's I wouldn't say it's equal across the world. And first, I think what has maybe changed in some parts of the world is that women feel more able to speak out. That's certainly what the Me Too movement brought about, that there's a willingness to go public. And I don't know if that happened because of social media, maybe because things can be so much more public than they used to be. But that doesn't go across the board. There are other countries. It sounds like Japan, probably that is not the case, that women are willing and able to speak out if they are abused, have violence against them. It's difficult. I think the Me Too movement is more nascent there, but women are beginning to speak out more. If not about domestic violence, then certainly about social issues. They have the Coutu movement, which is against being made to wear heels in the workplace and also being banned from wearing glasses because it makes them appear cold. So there are all kinds of new social initiatives now that are really coming to the fore. I think Miyako Kawakami says women are no longer content to shut up. It's funny about the wearing heels because we sort of raised our eyebrows, but actually a few years ago in London, there was a receptionist at a law firm and they required her to wear heels and she took them to court about it. So it's not just in Japan. It's elsewhere too, but maybe now we've come further in England because we can take people to court, whereas they might not be quite willing to yet in Japan. But still, things die hard. It takes a long time for things to become to equalize. Sorry, Nikita, go. I know what I was going to say was not necessarily about violence, but more in line with what Trace is saying about expectations. I recently read Invisible Women by Caroline Criado, which is all about data bias in the world and how the entire world, as we know it has been created physically in practical terms for men, whether that's how cities have been constructed or how heart diagnosis take place or medical trials. And it was sort of jaw-dropping when I read it, and I was also astounded at myself for not knowing most of what was in it, but it's a very diligent excavation of how much emotional labour a woman is carrying in the workplace and how little is done in order to sort of adapt to women's lives. But also, as I was saying, in the medical front or on buses or in shops or in the home, how little has been done to create things for women. She says at one point, this is not out of malice. This is because women are invisible and haven't been thought of when the construction of those environments is taking place. She was asked what's most infuriating for you of all of the things that you discovered when you were researching the book. She said it's that crash test dummies are always meant for when a car crashes. And when the EU decided to not do that, they used a smaller version of a male crash test dummy to test the car rather than a female one. So that's at the other end of the scale from having that violence, as is in Stephanie's book, where there's an overt act of misogyny. I guess that subtle gradation of misogyny that infiltrates everything. That's fascinating to me in that book. Sorry, I dropped out there for a second, but that's Caroline Criado Paris book, which is absolutely, what's a good read. It's very shocking, though, I think, isn't it? I just wanted to ask you, actually, as women writers, because I think we've definitely moved on a long way from when the Brontys had to have male pseudonyms in order to be taken seriously. But I just wondered what your experience had been as women writers or whether you felt that you'd been treated slightly differently or as women writers. Tracy, is that something that you could comment on? It's really hard. It's very subtle. And I think on the surface of it, I feel that I've been treated equally. But in reality, I know the numbers. I mean, I know they're getting better, but there are surveys taken of every year of how many, I can't remember what the name of this survey is, but they count up how many women have been reviewed and how many men have been reviewed, male authors, female authors, and also the reviewers, whether they're male or female. And it was really shocking. And I published first in 1997, and things have improved a lot because there was a huge outcry in this probably five or six years ago. And I think that to their credit, literary editors on newspapers have really tried hard to make it a little bit more equal. But I guess I dropped in the middle of that in 97 when it was not very equal at all. I have no idea if a male writer had written the books that I read, wrote, would I be further along in my career or would they have been taken more seriously? And there's this whole question of whether, because we know this classic thing that women will read books with male protagonists in them, but men tend not to. And I just don't know if we are more open-minded and men are less open-minded. I hate to make that kind of sweeping generalisation. But I've personally pushed against that by only reading women. For the longest time I realised I was just reaching for books by women and now I've had to kind of switch that a little bit to be a little bit more open-minded myself. But as a writer I think I've been pretty lucky and I haven't come up against being treated, paid less or treated less fairly. I think that men are probably still taken more seriously for the most part, male writers. But that's changing. I think there is a whole generation of the Ian McEwen's and Julian Barnes and Salman Rushdie and Martin Amos. Everybody talks about them and less about the women from that time, Rose Tremaine and Hilary Mantell. But the thing is it is shifting now. So there are definitely more and more women. I mean it's kind of crazy when you think of novelists, more women read novels, more women buy novels. So you would think there would actually probably be more novels published by women and they would do well. And I think that is slightly shifting. But it would be good I should shut up now and hear from the younger generation because you have a much closer experience to this than I do. Nikita, what about you? Well yeah, it's so interesting hearing what you're saying about the last 20 years. I think that I always become some sort of internalised misogyny comes to the fore and I always become obsessed with the idea of a male reader. Because I think when I'm about to be published with each book, the first cover that comes through strangely, even though it isn't really linked to anything in the book, is often purple or pink and has some sort of paisley pattern in my case all over there. And this book for example, it's got a great cover now I think but it's much grittier. It's very light and shade in dark spaces of London. It's nothing to do with looking like a pink cookery book from this subcontinent. But that's the first pass always with each book. And I find it bizarre and I think is that that they've eliminated in their head a certain kind of male reader or is that what the publishing industry thinks? Do you say anything to your publisher? I actually do love the dialogue I have and the editor I have and the publicity team because then it changes. So I have been able to talk this through. It hasn't just been a dark smoldering bitterness in the corner. I talk it through but I remember early on someone said to me, the ideal cover on a piece of literary fiction written by a woman is a woman in silhouette turning away. You can't see her face and she's a woman in silhouette turning away from the cover on the cover. Or she has her head cut off. But you mustn't see her face because the female reader and there is only a female reader for that book is going to put their own face into that silhouette or into that sliced off head. They will put their own head and it suggests that it's quite bizarre in gender lines and heteronormative etc. But it's also this idea that we eliminate men from reading female books and I found that idea quite difficult. I would say that you'd eliminate them as a possible reader for your book. Whereas with this book I've seen for example on Goodreads, which I always find very interesting, I see that it's split the readers of you people, split between male and female or where the pronouns are male and female. And so that's interesting to me but that's the part I find difficult of being a female writer, not differences in pay and that kind of thing. I feel that idea that you may not, there's a whole sector who may not read you and that that is assumed. I wonder if this feeds into that a little bit but there's a phenomenon that I and my fellow debuts, we've all bonded together over the pandemic so we're in touch quite a lot. But there's a phenomenon that that obsesses all of us, which is, you know, our female writers expected to relate their novels to themselves personally. And I guess also in terms of publicity, the kind of features that we are asked to write often to promote the book, they're extremely personal. There's almost a sense that with women you're expected to bleed onto the page. I do wonder if men are asked to do quite as much of that. I suspect not. That's really interesting. I feel like I'm going to look at the interviews and the pieces that men right now and with that in mind to see if that's the case. But I think you're absolutely right. A woman is meant to be more giving of herself. Certainly. I mean, when my novel is about mothers and daughters, and when I was writing it, you know, my mom became very seriously ill, I thought I might, we thought we might lose her and thankfully we didn't. And she's fine touch with now, but but that was that was a particular interest I think in the features I were asked. They were like, oh, could you talk about how that related to the novel, you know, as opposed to the novel being a piece of fiction that I'd crafted. Of course it had an impact, but I was very much expected to delve deep into the emotional Odyssey. I would like to know about my male contemporaries, and if they're expected to bleed quite so much. And did you say instead no to your publicist Ashley know I want to write articles about the misogynist culture and in Japan. Thank you very much. Right about that Stephanie. That's fascinating what you were talking about with the heels. But it is, it's what absolutely interests me. And again, it's, you know, it's what I researched, it's what I worked on. I think, you know, I won, I won anthropological grants for my work in Japan. And so, you know, I would love to talk about my research as opposed to my personal background and feelings. You always get asked whether it's autobiographical. I think that happens to me a lot with each book. But I assume that that happens to men as well. I mean, or do you think that that happens mainly to women? The assumption that it's 100%, 100% autobiographical that Tracy's gone back in time and lived in that. I think, I think that's, I think that is something that the people inflict upon women authors actually the assumption that it is autobiographical. And it's difficult because there's so much of oneself in every novel that we write. You know, my, my injured grandmother is a is a lawyer it's no coincidence at all that some because grandfather Yoshi is a lawyer and that I've chosen to tell the story through the prism of law. You know, I think my family always hoped I would be a lawyer, but that doesn't mean that this is the story of my life. But to be fair, that's probably the case of men as well. There's a lot of autobiographical elements because that's what you know writing all writing is going to reveal the interests of the writer, whether they write specifically about themselves or not. That's true. I think we're where's event event are you there. Can you hear me. Yeah. Yeah, we can hear you. We could. Good. Can you hear me at all. We can. Can you hear us. Oh, I think she's. Yes, I'm wondering if we were going to go on to questions from the audience if there are any but we don't have any access to that us three event has the access to it. I'm hoping that events going to come on. If not, maybe Ken, who's in the background. Everybody there are people in the background here who are doing stuff so they might be able to feed those questions to us. Ah, no, that's here. Can you hear me now. Oh, I'm sorry. I just keep dropping out and coming back in again and so I'm really sorry about that. I just thought perhaps we could as a as a kind of wrapping up and trying to be a bit positive about about everything is just. Could you just tell me what where where what makes you feel optimistic about the future for for women's rights and how can we finish this unfinished business. Do you think I'll I think I am really heartened by by movements like me to by the invisible woman, the book. I just feel like that book will not have been published even 10 years ago and and the fact that it is and that people are talking about it and I get it. It's referenced so often and I think wow people are really opening opening their eyes and I that makes me really hopeful about the future. Right. Yeah, my, um, I guess my books about autism on one level and whether autism exists and during the pandemic. I've seen that. You know, all of these grassroots movements have sprung up within the community where people are helping each other and that goes for the women who are on their own living on their own or who are in difficult domestic situations. You know, just in the roads, the road that I live in. I got someone knocking on the door saying they were collecting for someone who is like many was in a tricky domestic violence situation during lockdown in order to get her out and get us set up in a council flat near us. And that kind of thing that happened a lot in the pandemic, you know, looking after elders who are on their own. And that that made that made me feel optimistic in terms of the fact that I was interested in altruism for the book. Stephanie. Yes, I think there is a great deal of hope. I love the, the energy of women the focus and you know I think you can see it even you can see it particularly in the literary world in Japan where you know it has traditionally been extremely female focused. There are now some fantastic voices who are coming to the fore and and really occupying their rightful place, I think in center stage and so that is that is extremely heartening to just here and and and see and and there is you know things are changing every society society around the world is evolving and so that is always an encouraging thing. Well, thank you. Just before we go then I'm just a quick reminder that there are more free unfinished business leads events taking place over this weekend so you can find details of those on the British Library website. I just like to say thank you so much to the authors tracing the Keter and Stephanie to the British Library and leads libraries to unique media for hosting the event. And to all of you out there who've been attending I hope you've enjoyed the evening. And just another quick reminder that you can use the menu above to give us any feedback. Thanks very much everybody and sorry I was a bit glitchy. It was lovely to speak to you all thank you. Goodbye. Hi. Bye.