( 1 ) Grudova’s debut novel, Children of Paradise, follows Holly, an employee at an old cinema called the Paradise whose responsibilities include cleaning the filthy bathrooms.
On The ShelfCAMILLA GRUDOVA on getting gross with fiction.
On The ShelfCAMILLA GRUDOVA on getting gross with fiction.
For Camilla Grudova, a short story is a “vision” through which she explores the society we live in. In her celebrated collections, The Doll’s Alphabet and The Coiled Serpent—as well as her novel, Children of Paradise—Grudova poses difficult and awkward questions, such as: Where does all the waste go once we expel it from our bodies? How do institutions of power perpetuate themselves? Where have all the insects gone in the last few years? Ultimately, the Canadian-born, Edinburgh-based writer—who was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2023—wants readers to come up with their own answers.
Kabelo Sandile Motsoeneng: Ordinary, unassuming places tend to morph into the grotesque in your work. How do these places—real or imagined—inform your writing process?
Camilla Grudova: I’m drawn to an architectural space as the beginning of a story. If you work in bars or cinemas, you have to clean the bathrooms—that’s where you realize just how chaotic human beings are.1 I think it’s because I’m a Libra as well: I’m highly sensitive to my surroundings.
KSM: The stories in The Coiled Serpent, like most of your fiction, deviate from “traditional” form. How did you arrive at this approach?
