{"id":5757,"date":"2014-09-22T23:30:25","date_gmt":"2014-09-22T23:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.victoriahislop.com\/?p=5757"},"modified":"2016-09-15T17:42:38","modified_gmt":"2016-09-15T17:42:38","slug":"victoria-hislop-finds-novel-inspiration-overseas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/victoria-hislop-finds-novel-inspiration-overseas\/","title":{"rendered":"Victoria Hislop finds novel inspiration overseas"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Jaine Blackman<\/a> for Oxford Mail<\/a>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\"victoria-oxford\"Her husband may be a very well-known face on TV, but bestselling novelist Victoria Hislop, who visits Woodstock on Monday, is big in Greece. Jaine Blackman reports<\/p>\n

The Hislop family is undoubtedly a super-bright one.<\/p>\n

Bestselling novelist Victoria and Private Eye editor Ian met at Oxford University, their daughter Emily graduated from the same esteemed establishment and their son William is currently studying history there.<\/p>\n

\u201cIan is much cleverer than I am,\u201d insists Victoria, whose debut 2005 novel The Island has to date sold more than three million copies worldwide, been translated into 31 languages and was made into a hit 26-part Greek TV series, in which both Victoria and Ian had walk-on parts.<\/p>\n

The 55-year-old author, who has written four novels and one book of short stories, always gets her husband\u2019s feedback before sending her manuscript to the publisher.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt takes him about two days to go through it, and at the end of the two days he gives me a tutorial. It\u2019s not problematic. We were at the same university doing the same degree [English] at the same time,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIan is much more intellectual than I am. At university, he used to lend people his essays so they could copy them. He should have rented them out at 50p a go because it would have paid his bar bill.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know for a fact that people marking that paper in our finals must have wondered why we were all saying the same thing.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I am anxious when I give my manuscript to him, as to what he\u2019s going to find,” she continues. \u201cIt\u2019s not very comfortable, because I want serious comment. He doesn\u2019t do a lot of detail, but he gives me feedback which I take in and absorb.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thankfully, he didn\u2019t have anything drastic to say about her latest novel, The Sunrise, set in the sunshine resort of Famagusta in Cyprus in 1972, where Greek and Turkish Cypriots live in harmony. It centres on an ambitious couple who open the most glitzy hotel there – The Sunrise – only for prosperity and happiness to be scuppered by the conflict between Turkey and Greece, with devastating effects on both Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities.<\/p>\n

Victoria first visited the city on a gap year in 1978, when the war had split the north from the south of the island, only to find that Famagusta \u2013 once a thriving city and tourist haven with a myriad of beachfront hotels \u2013 was now a ghost town surrounded by barbed wire netting, fencing off the hotels, manned by Turkish armed guards. \u201cWe weren\u2019t allowed to go anywhere near the beach, which is the main focal point of the book,\u201d she explains. When she returned years later, nothing had changed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the first book I\u2019ve written about a place where you can\u2019t go. The buildings have remained derelict or ransacked. I assume that the rats and the mice don\u2019t bother to go in there, because there can\u2019t be any food left.\u201d (read the full interview here<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Jaine Blackman for Oxford Mail Her husband may be a very well-known face on TV, but bestselling novelist Victoria Hislop, who visits Woodstock on Monday, is big in Greece. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5969,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[214,59,446,203],"tags":[303],"class_list":["post-5757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-famagusta","category-interview-2","category-news","category-the-sunrise","tag-en","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5757\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}