Photo by Qncho Sabev
July 26, 2022 – Irina Papancheva gave an interview to Dalia Davidkova of the prestigious Literary Newspaper about ‘Brussels Naked’.
In it she talks about the process of writing her novel.
‘The creative process was extremely interesting and difficult. On the one hand, there were the characters. I had to get into the heads, hearts, culture, values and way of speaking of characters of different nationalities, races and religions. Almost all the narrators and some of the other characters have a real prototype, which may be only a distant inspiration, but the thought of them, of the way they speak and think helped me to build vivid and full-blooded images. I was doing research about the countries they came from, about events and beliefs that may have marked their lives before Brussels.
On the other hand, there was the city. I walked through the neighbourhoods I was describing, having lived in many of them myself, and then I turned them into literary environment. I also researched their history and added touches from it, trying not to overburden the book with historical facts.
Thirdly, I wanted to have the EU and key events from its history in the plot. It was not easy to integrate this line naturally, into the thoughts, conversations and daily life of my characters without it taking over. Because of it, I edited the first chapter six-seven times.
The structure was also a challenge. My main character Iris, named after the flower- symbol of Brussels, is a central character only in the chapters in which she a narrator – the first and last ones. In the rest she has an episodic appearance or is does not participate at all. Like in real life, where we are protagonists only for ourselves, but not for others. It was particularly interesting to me to build the links between the stories and the characters so that the chapters could almost exist on their own, but also to be part of a larger whole where the reader could find out what happened later with the different characters.
The creative process gave me the experience and courage to write my first experimental novel, although I play with the structure also in the previous ones. It also gave me the opportunity to work with Hristo Dimitrov – Hindo, whose original ideas and encyclopedic knowledge greatly enriched two of my previous books, but for the first time he is my official editor. At an earlier stage, I received invaluable comments from Zlatina Ruseva, the programme director of the Millennium Festival in Brussels. The edits and ideas of the British poet and writer Phil Madden, whose poem opens the book, helped for polishing the style and building on the first draft. I also found the opinion of the writers Luis Quimper, Ali Bader and Iain Sinclair, whose novels about London became very popular, as well as of the Belgian literary guide Jan Dorpmans useful. This process ended with turning the manuscript into a book thanks to Rumyana Emanuilidu and ‘Znatsi’ publishing house’, Irina Papancheva says.
You can find the entire interview in Bulgarian here.