We were thrilled to have the opportunity to chat with of one of this year’s Booker Prize longlisted authors, Selby Wynn Schwartz. Read on for a wonderful conversation between bookseller Aurelia Orr and Schwartz about writing, mythology and her nominated work, After Sappho.

Can you tell us a bit about your novel and perhaps even about the eponymous, Sappho?

Very little is known about Sappho, a lyric poet who lived on the island of Lesbos around 630 B.C., and her poems survive only as slivers and shreds of lines — and yet she continues to be venerated, especially by those who believe in the potential of women’s writing. Around the turn of the 20th century in Europe, some circles of women who wanted the rights to their own lives — artists, feminists, writers, sapphists — looked to Sappho as a model. I drew my characters from these circles, researching their experiences and creations, and then tried to re-imagine a collective biography for them: a story of their questions and desires and ideas in the process of becoming themselves. Some are actresses, some are revolutionaries, some are translators, some are heiresses; they range widely in their modes of gender and sexuality, but they all want the possibility of writing their own lives.

What made you want to write this story?

I have always been interested in the ways that artists navigate gender; my first book was about drag dance. But it wasn’t until I began to learn about Lina Poletti, a little-known Italian poet who lived her queerness very boldly, that I felt I might have something to write. She became a sort of emblem for me, and I gathered other feminist lives around hers until I had enough material to interweave many stories together.

In reading the book I encountered so many memorable women – some strangers and some whose stories I had a little knowledge of already. Had you always planned to combine both well-known authors and artists with lesser known ones?

In many cases, the lives of famous women — Virginia Woolf, Sarah Bernhardt, Colette — were already intertwined with equally fascinating but more obscure lives. For example, even someone who had seen a photograph of Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet might not know Giacinta Pezzana, the actress who played that role before her. I think that this might be the texture of history, this variegation of strangeness and well-worn stories? In any case, the grain of lesser-known lives gave me a rich ground for imagination. To read in Jane Robinson’s Bluestockings, for example, that young women at Girton College in 1881 had mutton casserole with turnips for dinner, often got chilblains, and ran their own fire brigade is to begin to conjure an image of their evenings together.

Your book champions the beauty and love women can have for themselves and each other in a world that continues to demand conformity to patriarchal roles and standards. On the surface, the novel could be described as a work of historical fiction, but how do you feel it relates to the struggles of women today?

I sincerely wish for a time in which my book might appear hopelessly outdated and irrelevant. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could barely remember that distant era in which people still had to struggle with the white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy?

Although their stories held common threads, each woman’s perspective was distinctly unique. Was there a particular challenge or reward in representing so many voices?

There is a chorus in the book, a ‘we’ that narrates a polyphonic perspective on all of these lives, laws, and historical events. For me, this first-person plural helped to hold the threads together; ‘we’ are always in the process of becoming, even as we look to different models and forms of writing a life.

I’m quite interested in the structure of After Sappho. What made you decide to tell the story through vignettes rather than a traditional novel format?

I was very taken by Anne Carson’s Short Talks when I read them some years ago — so taken that I longed to be able to write like that. She is a poet and a classicist and once translated a fragment of lyric verse by Ibykos using only words from the instruction manual to her microwave. Unfortunately, the only person who can write like Anne Carson is Anne Carson; I failed, predictably and repeatedly. Over the course of my failure, though, I discovered this fragmentary form, these glimpses of a life that could be braided into larger narratives.

Did anything during the writing process of After Sappho surprise you?

I’m easily surprised and often delighted by research, so every day I learned something that astonished me. Did you know that Sarah Bernhardt’s pet alligator died from drinking too much champagne? Did you know that Eleonora Duse founded a Library for Actresses? More chillingly, did you know that women in France could not vote until 1944, and that the Italian transfeminist collective Non Una di Meno reports 63 victims of fatal acts of cisheteropatriarchal violence thus far this year in Italy alone?

Are there any formative authors or stories from throughout your life that influenced the novel?

The list of writers I am indebted to would overbrim this page, but I imagine that it’s obvious how much I owe to Virginia Woolf and to Anne Carson. Other writers I looked up to while writing this novel include Monique Truong, Saidiya Hartman, Elena Ferrante, Danielle Dutton, Natalia Ginzburg, and Dionne Brand. In general I love reading writers who can do things with language, form, and imagination that are beyond what I can do.

What are you reading right now?

I just finished Lara Pawson’s This Is the Place to Be, Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, and Yara Rodrigues Fowler’s Stubborn Archivist. Next on my list are Kathryn Davis’ Aurelia, Aurélia and Elif Batuman’s Either/Or.

Can you recommend some titles for those of us who have devoured your book?

For readers who want actual biographies of the women who became my characters, I can recommend Diana Souhami’s No Modernism Without Lesbians, Artemis Leontis’ Eva Palmer Sikelianos, and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Bricktop’s Paris, as well as Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting. For readers who are looking for strikingly imaginative feminist experiments in writing a life, I’d recommend Danielle Dutton’s Margaret the First, Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living, Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, and Lara Pawson’s This Is the Place to Be.

And last, but definitely not least, if Sappho were here today, what would you say to her?

yes! radiant lyre speak to me/ become a voice

[Sappho, Fragment 118; translated by Anne Carson].