 I'm a former journalist and now a full-time novelist. My first two works of fiction grew out of situations of conflict, hinterland, based on the stories of Afghan children that I met in the back streets of Europe, and the memory stones, which is about the stolen children of women who were disappeared during Argentina's dirty war in the 1970s. But the photograph I've chosen tonight is by a photographer called Moises Samann. He's an award-winning Peruvian Spanish photographer with Magnum, and his photos were paired with one of my stories in the New York Times. And we also used one of his other pictures on the cover of Hinterland in the paper bag. This is what Moises himself says about his work when he was selecting photographs for his recent book about the Arab Spring. I felt the need to transcend the news aspect of the story, to incorporate the quieter pictures that are sometimes overlooked because they capture moments just before or just after the main event. Moises does those main event pictures, too. But many of his photos are far more nuanced than the heat of battle moments we have come to expect from war reporters since Robert Kappa. They take an oblique angle. They capture moments of introspection, and they seem to suggest in an existential sense how profoundly alone we are as human beings. This picture, I think, has something of that quality. It's a 2009 photo depicting an Afghan adolescent sheltering in the squalor of an abandoned hospital in Northwestern Greece. Though it may not immediately look like it, I consider it very much a photograph of conflict. The teenager in the picture is a refugee whose life has been upended by the geopolitical machinery of world events, in this case the war on occupation of Afghanistan. And he is one among many thousands of miners that conflict has flung out alone into the wider world. I feel some affinity between what Moises is doing in photography and what I'm trying to express in fiction. I, too, am interested in the quiet stories, the forgotten people and their struggles that take place after, sometimes long after, the main event. Now authors are always being asked where we get our ideas. Margaret Atwood says that the job of the writer is to travel down to the underworld in search of stories, and if we are lucky, to bring them back into the light. I felt a little worried when I first heard that, but at the same time, I know what she means. My research for both books, but particularly for The Memory Stones, taught me to some pretty dark places, and there were moments when I had to say enough and just get out with what I had. Novelists almost by definition are interested in conflict. That's what creates narrative tension and keeps the reader reading. I myself am particularly drawn to the inherent drama of stories where the personal stakes are high, where a literal or metaphorical journey is set in motion by events beyond the character's control. Often a piece of fiction will have its germ in a tiny incident that over time becomes dense enough and rich enough to sustain a novel length work. One of my books grew out of a scene that on the face of it had nothing to do with war at all. In Paris, I saw a boy climbing over a park fence at nightfall and pulling a sheet of cardboard out from against a wall. That scene became part of the story of a journey, and a journey just happens to be one of the seven narrative archetypes that are deeply ingrained in the human psyche. My second novel had several starting points, but one of them was a conversation that took place in Buenos Aires in a room that was frozen in time. It was the untouched bedroom of a young man who had vanished 40 years earlier at the age of 19. His mother, who sat and talked to me about his disappearance at the hands of the military junta, was then also, in some sense, frozen by his loss. That conversation informed a novel that became the story of a quest, another of those narrative archetypes. These stories of the aftermath of conflict are all around us if we look for them. Conflict may start on the battlefield, but it plays out far beyond the combat zone. Writing about war can sometimes throw up ethical dilemmas, and in my case, I find trauma quite hard to write about. I worry about the salaciousness and the exploitative nature of using experiences that living people have been through in order to sell books. Yet the violence underpinning such narratives requires acknowledgement. In the end, I used indirect forms, flashbacks and dream hauntings in hinterland, and a small section written in a fractured kind of poetry for the physical and mental disintegration that takes place under torture in the memory stones. My work isn't primarily about redemption. I'm not a huge optimist about human nature. What interests me instead is survival, how people find the courage to come through slaughter, to keep going and to stay alive. Perhaps a photograph can only ever be a beginning, a novel because of its engagement with time, with the subjectivity of character, because of its narrative arc, can take you on the journey, can bring you along on somebody else's quest. But you can't overwhelm the reader with the darkness of the underworld. What draws me to writing about conflict is finding the thread out of the labyrinth, the acts of kindness which are often the true miracle, the things that fiction can salvage from the dark. Thank you.