Episode 22- Hanya Yanagihara: The People in Trees - Part 1

Hawaiian-born Hanya Yanagihara has been feted across the world, and longlisted for 2015's Man Booker Prize, for her amazing A Little Life. A Writing Life podcast is on the way.----more----

Last year Writing Life met Hanya for equally unsettling and unputdownable debut, The People in the Trees, the story of an anthropologist who travels to a tiny Micronesian island in the search for extended life and ends up accused of child abuse. 

In the first part of this three part interview, we met at a noisy Berners Street hotel. Hanya began by wondering whether she feels like a novelist. Then:

• the importance of her work for Conde Nast in freeing her creatively
• 'My only concern with the books is the world I create be as logical and complete as possible'
• the conservative nature of modern publishing
• laziness and taking 20 years to write a novel
• the strain of writing as an old man
• where did the idea for the novel come from?
• the real-life story of the novel's inspiration, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek
• researching Gajdusek, science and controversy
• Hawaii, Barack Obama and Yanagihara's cultural background
• 'I am the first generation of my family not to work in the fields'
• colonisation in Hawaii and Yanagihara's fiction 
• The Tempest as inspiration for The People in the Trees
• travel, Empire, science and transformation
• love, loneliness, science and Yanagihara's central character, Norton Perina
• genius and the 'Great Man'
• Yanagihara's scientist father
• moral questions: does the end always justify the means in scientific research
• the vexed question of extended life 
• 'Nobody wants you to be old anymore'

Read my review in the Independent of The People in the Trees here.