A blog I visit regularly is Literary Minded, brainchild of Melbourne-based emerging writer and critic Angela Meyer. Here is her posting from Monday this week.

Eva Hornung on Dog Boy, Writing and Activism
March 9, 2009 – by LiteraryMinded

In October 2006, I was sitting at the airport in Bali after the Ubud Writers’ and Readers’ Festival, and Eva Hornung (then Sallis) and her gorgeous little boy came and sat next to me. I had seen her speak during the festival, and read her book Fire, Fire, which I found quite confronting.

We talked about the festival, and about writing (I’d just finished my very first novel draft), and then she told me she was actually off to Russia to research her next novel. She told me about a street kid, in freezing cold temperatures, who lived with dogs. I can’t remember any of the exact wording of the conversation, but I know that the story stuck with me, and ever since then I have been waiting for news of this book.

When I finally got to read Dog Boy and review it for Bookseller+Publisher I found it ‘ultimately moving, frightening, and heartbreaking.’
I was really glad that Eva agreed to answer a few questions about the book, her writing, and activism.

What inspired you to tell the story of Romochka?
Many things, but a news story about a boy living with dogs in Moscow catalysed it.

Why was it important to describe Romochka’s world, and his interaction with the dog family in such raw detail?
I’m not sure why, really. In hindsight I can say that the book needed that, but at the time I was really just following my nose, exploring an idea. Really I began seeking out for myself what it might be like, and then found the novel growing from that.

I was very moved by Dog Boy. I was also moved by your recent, incredible, story ‘Life Sentence’ published in Overland 193. Do you think literary fiction has the ability to create empathy, and encourage further learning?

I think literary fiction can at its best give us a thought- and feeling-provoking semblance of experiences outside our own. As this is one of the great seductions to which humans are susceptible, literary fiction can be persuasive, engaging, transforming. What it brings us, however, can be fine or trite, truthful or distortive, and not even authors always know what they are doing. All we can do as authors is serve our project with passion, the best honesty we can muster, and attention to craft.
We are usually the first seduced, the first to fall, and often self-deceiving. I’m glad you liked ‘Life Sentence’ - I was very seduced by it: idea, enaction, final effect, metaphors.

At the time when Overland unexpectedly accepted it, I had begun to think it was a piece I had written for myself and the very few readers who know cockatoos well.
If literary fiction is capable of creating empathy, encouraging further learning, then it is as dangerous as all political tyrants believe it to be ­- and this goes both ways. This would of course mean fiction is capable of evil. Fortunately, I think the capabilities of author and artwork are more modest, and despite the many historical instances of art in service of state, or in service of revolution, I have a feeling that fiction that is great speaks to our private growing selves, not our public performance selves, and so it is a more profound and more impotent artform than all praise or fears would make of it.

Read the full interview at Literary Minded.