Kitaab interview about my creative process
Selma Carvalho
Team Kitaab: Your prose is described as “lyrical and beguiling.” How do you cultivate this distinctive writing style, and what role does language play in conveying the emotional depth of your characters and narratives?
Selma Carvalho: My fiction books are really for people who enjoy beautiful language. The pages of my books brim with the lives of everyday people doing everyday things, told in as much a poetic form as novel writing allows.
The sentence is always supreme to me, and I take a great deal of care when crafting sentences, they have to have a certain rhythm, a certain acoustic to them to make them beautiful. I’m a lover of nature and part of the lyricism stems from my enduring relationship with nature. I read a lot of nature writers, J. A. Baker being the absolute king of British nature writers. I take the liberty of quoting one such nature-inspired paragraph from my book ‘Notes on a Marriage.’
Paths in winter, wet and waterlogged, sometimes obscured and at other times clear, all lead somewhere. The trees are transcendent against an endless grey no less graceful than had a craftsman chiselled the branches. Shorn shrubs pose their antler crowns and tines, the birds are quieter, silenced into submission, their wheezy cries come at long pauses, a rancorous owl hoots in the windless woods, gulls lift to sky, wheeling and swooping, and houses, when they appear, glow their gauzy light from the depths of a cloudy fog.
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