Interview: Winner of Viking's fiction with a sense of place award
Abraham Verghese discusses The Covenant of Water, which won an award at 2024’s Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards
How do you feel about winning Viking’s
Fiction with a Sense of Place award
I’m thrilled because ships feature in all my novels and I love cruising, so it’s
doubly meaningful.
Kerala is a coastal strip in India with 44 rivers and there is a recurring trope in the novel, “all water is connected”. Viking embodies that, crossing oceans to link people across the world.
Why did you set The Covenant of Water
in India?
I was born and raised in Africa and
didn’t feel I had the authority writing
about India that I felt writing Cutting
for Stone, my first novel in Ethiopia.
However, my parents are Indian, we spent summers with grandparents in Kerala and I went to medical school in Chennai, so it is familiar to me.
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How did you create a vivid sense of place?
I made several trips to capture sights,
sounds, scents and textures to make
the novel come alive. I also included
conversations with relatives, friends
and academics raised there.
How did you develop The Covenant of
Water’s multifaceted characters?
It’s a process of revision. A character’s
nature is revealed when they make a
choice. I frequently changed the story’s
direction because a character made a
surprising choice that felt authentic –
that is when characters truly come alive.
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Where in India would you like to cruise?
Characters Digby and Rune visit
Chennai and Cochin so it’d be
wonderful to retrace their route. Kerala is referred to as the “spice coast”
because Arabs, Portuguese, Dutch,
French and British explorers collected
spices there. In cruising to India, I would
be recapitulating history and my novel.
What advice do you have for aspiring
writers?
Read the genre you want to publish in and do a tremendous amount of
research on the ground. There’s always
a moment where you have done enough
research and it is time to write, which
is the hardest part.
What do you hope readers will take
away from your novel?
My ambition was simple: a good story
well told. I hope readers feel inspired
to value every moment; I am delighted
when I hear they want to visit India
because of my novel.
World of Cruising readers can benefit from a 15 per cent discount using the code WORLD2024 at checkout on stanfords.co.uk.
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