Barbara Trapido was born in South Africa and is the author of six novels, including Frankie and Stankie, which was longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize, and Brother of the More Famous Jack. She lives in Oxford. Her latest novel is Sex and Stravinsky. Barbara recently spoke to GR about her writing process and her newest novel.

About Sex and Stravinsky:
The time is 1995, but everybody is linked by their past. Brilliant Australian Caroline can command everyone except her own ghoulish mother, which means that things aren't easy for Josh and Zoe, her husband and twelve-year-old-daughter.
Josh has bizarre origins in a South African mining town, but now teaches mime in Bristol. Zoe reads girls' ballet books and longs for ballet lessons; a thing denied to her until, on a school French exchange, she meets a runaway boy in a woodland hut. In its mix of people from different spheres, the book throws up the complexity, cruelty and richness of the global world while, as a sequence of personal stories, it comes together like a dance; a masquerade in which things are not always what they seem.

GR: What inspired you to write Sex and Stravinsky?

BT: Thinking back, several things may have got into the mix, though I'm never conscious of them at the time of writing. A passion for girls' ballet books in childhood, combined with a few items that stayed with me from the Art Deco exhibition years ago - a large silver desk and some of Picasso's costumes for the Ballets Russes. I'd also, some years before, read an early autobiography of Stravinsky's in which he describes vividly, himself and Picasso on the loose in Naples, having been sent there by Diagileff to find a story for a ballet based on traditional Italian street comedy. The book had the composer's photograph on the cover; a picture that causes two of my student characters to consider whether or not Stravinsky's glasses are sexy ... 

GR: You have a great knack for creating engaging and entertaining characters. What techniques do you use when creating them? Are they ever based on people you know?

BT: I don't know that I have 'techniques'. The characters rise from somewhere in the back of my brain and they start talking to each other. I don't usually 'see' them that clearly. Not for quite a long time. I hear their voices very distinctly and I see the general shape of them and the way they move. I usually sense a sort of mood around them. Sometimes, years later, I see someone coming towards me in the street and I think 'That's him! That's Roger Goldman!' The technique is a lot like dreaming, but once I've got them, I try to inhabit them, physically, by (literally) walking around in their shoes and shouting across the table in their voices, etc. Only walk-on parts are occasionally based on real-life people; just the scene shifters, sometimes, and they're always more two-dimensional. I think the main characters may be ways of trying out versions of oneself, regardless of gender, age, social class, etc. Who knows?

GR: Several of your previous books have been shortlisted for awards and you’ve won the Whitbread Special Prize for Brother of the More Famous Jack. Do you ever feel pressure to write a book that will receive critical acclaim?

BT: Winning prizes, or being shortlisted, is a stroke of luck. It's a lottery. It's never made me feel like Mrs Important, or that I should write a certain kind of book. When I'm writing, I'm simply playing by myself. At that stage I'm not thinking at all about who is going to read the book, or what sort of reception it's going to get.

GR: The family dynamic plays a significant role in Sex and Stravinsky. Have your own experiences as a mother influenced your writing?

BT: Becoming a mother is such a baptism of fire, I think that inevitably it changes you and it infiltrates everything you do. That said, I invented the stroppy adolescent Goldman boys, for example, long before I'd had children and, as a person with no brothers who always went to single sex schools, I'd had no real experience of that sort of family life. You go inside your head and imagine what it's like.

GR: People often talk of their childhood in South Africa as being bleak, but you always include a light side. What is your fondest memory of growing up in South Africa?

BT: Inevitably, growing up there, with passionately anti-racist parents, made it a conflicted experience. I was always burdened with an awareness that I was being unfairly advantaged. But at the same time, the sun shone day after day and my best memories have to do with climbing trees and making secret houses for my dolls in the giant bamboo clump.

GR: You’ve mentioned in other interviews that you want to spend more time there now, have you been able to?

BT: After 1994 my husband and I would go back every year and we thought about retiring there. Since he died, two years ago, I've somehow not made it back, but I will. Soon! I have a little grandson there and a daughter who is a food writer, so I must; I must!

GR: What authors do you love to read?

BT: Among contemporary fiction writers, Jane Gardam always gives me great pleasure and her last two novels are just perfect. I'm a bit addicted to Donna Leon when it comes to crime fiction. Right now I'm passionate about a young Scottish writer called Alan Bissett. Tricky dialogue, but it explodes on the page like James Joyce. He's fabulous. 

GR: You aren’t a prolific writer, instead you seem to spend time focusing on quality instead of quantity. Is the writing process an arduous one for you?

BT: Well, yes, it's hard work because it takes so much emotional and intellectual energy. Getting it right; getting the stuff to dance for you, is a matter of acting out, weeping, yelling at yourself in the mirror, etc. Also, getting the syntax and the prose rythms right seems to take an eternity of fiddling and re-writing and reading aloud over and over. But it's an intense private pleasure/ private pain. And another reason I'm slow is because I'm not very disciplined, and I too readily seek escapes from work when it gets difficult. 

GR: Sex and Stravinsky features characters from all over the world. What impact do you think today’s global world is having on relationships?

BT: I think that people crashing together from different cultures makes life more exciting and more dynamic and more creative, but it also makes it a lot more difficult and complex. We know, also, that it's good for the gene pool, but emotionally, it can be hazardous. But what the hell. Let's go for it. Without it there wouldn't be Jazz.

GR: In one review, the life of an author is described as being ‘by necessity often lonely.’ Do you think the life of an author is a lonely one?

BT: It's sometimes solitary, because there's no way you can occupy your imaginary world and engage with pretend people when you've got all your real-life people around you. But for myself, I'm quite gregarious; a gregarious introvert. Maybe it's why I'm so slow. Too much time spent chattering with friends in cafes.

GR: I’ve seen a picture of the room you write in at your house in Oxford; it’s simply gorgeous. For you, how important is space and solitude for the writing process?

BT: I do most of my writing sitting up in bed at between 4am and breakfast time, scribbling with an oily biro in an A4 pad. The 'space' is sort of more inside my head.