Novelist who opens up hidden places

Trezza Azzopardi's first book reached the Man Booker shortlist, but she has come a long way since then, she tells Eileen Battersby.

Most début novelists might understandably have their heads turned by an unexpected Man Booker prize shortlisting. That level of step from obscurity to literary fame not only brings its own problems but also can make the business of writing that invariably difficult second novel even more daunting. Trezza Azzopardi's experience was different. "I had started my second novel before The Hiding Place [her first novel\] was published. Winnie's story had been in my head for a long time: I just had to write it." But once The Hiding Place began to gather critical attention, she says, it became harder to finish Remember Me, that second novel.

Azzopardi is immediately likeable, small and open-faced, honest, intent on giving her listener a sense of what the past few years as a writer have been like. There is no pretence, no artifice, nothing of the world-weary artist about her; nor does she have the defiance of someone who has finally made it. If she has an ego, it is well in check. Although The Hiding Place has been hailed as the story of the Maltese community in Cardiff, she knows it is the story of one family, nothing more, nothing less. Malta and Wales were merely settings for the telling.

Although born in Cardiff, she has only minor traces of a Welsh lilt, undercutting a standard south of England accent. Pale, with dark red hair, there is nothing particularly Maltese about her appearance either. "My father came from Malta, my mother is Welsh, but I don't feel particularly strongly about either place." She seems far more English. "Well, I have lived mainly in Norwich and London, and I live in Norwich now."

The Hiding Place (2000) was never the story of her family. "My mother certainly didn't see it as our story. She was quite worked up about the idea that anyone might think it was our story," she says with a loud burst of laughter. "I have my hand, unlike the girl in the book. I'm not autobiographical at all, I just use things and then twist them about."

She says she is a late developer. "I was teaching, working with the deaf. I'd always like the idea of writing, but I'd never really got down to it until I had finished a scriptwriter's course." By then it was the late 1990s and she was in her late 30s.

She is a good talker, relaxed and anecdotal, yet deceptively intense and as careful about the way she uses language in speech as she is when writing. She seems interested in most things, asks about books by other writers, "Have you read the new Tobias Wolff?" she asks. "I just got it."

Born in 1961, she seems younger than that would imply, quite girlish, although she is preoccupied with short-term memory loss. "I think every woman over 40 begins to lose her memory. Once I hit 40, I couldn't seem to remember things, little things, even words, the names of things. It's very worrying. I think I've become obsessed with it." She could be kidding, and jokes about "this memory thing", and we begin discussing Disney/Pixar's Finding Nemo. In that film, Dory, the chatty blue fish, suffers from this problem, and keeps reminding everyone: "I have short-term memory loss". Azzopardi laughs, but a darker edge emerges; she sees this as a real problem. She fiddles with her long hair and mentions a recent battle of wits with her teenage stepson. She has no children.

Azzopardi is forthcoming and friendly and doesn't set up barriers. Looking around the smart Dublin hotel room that is her home for the night, she says: "Isn't it impressive? The first thing I did was to tidy it up. I always have to rearrange things: the notepaper, the soaps."

Her second novel, Remember Me, has just been published. It is deliberately far removed from Cardiff and the Maltese community. "I never wanted to get involved in writing about the Maltese in Wales. It is just a fact about the first book: the family has that connection. But you're right, Remember Me has nothing to do with that. I didn't want to become tied to a place because I'm not, tied to it, I mean, to any place. I don't feel strongly about those places, but when I did go to Malta, to visit my father's place, I have to say I thought it was paradise it was so beautiful."

Remember Me is light years removed from that. It feels more like Orwell's England and is set in a place that could be Norwich, but the setting is irrelevant. It is about Winnie, now 72 and homeless.

"I think it is every woman's nightmare. Being old and homeless. You see these women on the streets, living in cardboard boxes, and you wonder, how did this happen to her, what made her life go so wrong? I know you see far more men in this situation, and of course it is tragic, but when you, I, see an old woman you, I, can't help but think, that could be me."

The character of Winnie was inspired by Nora Bridle, who had lived on the streets in Cardiff, where there are lots of lanes and alleys. "I just remember her as old; she was a real character: independent, tough. Everyone knew her. There were lots of stories. I had forgotten all about her, but then something I saw sparked it off in my mind. I began to ask about her. When she died, a large crowd went to her funeral. No one knew what had happened to her, why had she ended up living like that." So her novel set out to explore what makes such a life.

Winnie's existence is a series of disasters. She is consistently abused and neglected. Her mother's early death leads to her father depositing her with her grandfather. From this point on, she is subjected to a denial of her self. Her very identity is erased. Yet in old age, she begins to reclaim her self by revisiting the past and the stages that led her to this. Azzopardi subtly releases the information through a narrative that, if it has a fault, is almost too beautiful for full credibility.

Winnie appears to have the mind of a poet. Azzopardi considers this: "Well, I suppose it is her mind and we don't know what goes on in it. It is her internal life, the secret life no one else knows."

But for Winnie, who is never bitter and retains our sympathy throughout her almost dreamlike recall of a nightmare life, the story is also one of relentless humiliation. Women more than men remain prey to sexual humiliation. Winnie's sole experience of love is also destroyed.

She ultimately comes to prefer being institutionalised; it is safer. After 24 years of safety, freedom has no appeal. "I didn't want to go, either. Twenty-four years: buildings grow, and fall, and grow again, money gets smaller, colours get bigger, sounds are louder, people are faster - everything has changed. But not you: same clothes, same skin underneath them, same bones."

In The Hiding Place, Dolores, the youngest of six daughters born to a Maltese ne'er-do-well immigrant to Cardiff and the Welsh girl he had married in the full flush of romance, tells the story both from a child's perspective and also from that of an adult returned after a long absence. Unwanted at birth by a father desperate for a son, Dolores is badly burnt in a fire. She loses her hand. "At first when I thought of having this character so badly disfigured, I felt, oh no, you can't do this to a little girl; what a terrible thing to do to a child. But that's the thing with telling a story, making up one: you can do anything and it's not going to hurt anyone."

Both Dolores and Winnie have been damaged by other people. But the real victim in The Hiding Place is the mother. Having suffered the effects of a hopeless marriage, she is left rearing a family that must be divided by necessity. Years later, when Dolores, having sought sanctuary in a safe life in a library, returns home to her mother's funeral, she discovers exactly how damaged each of her sisters has been as well. It is the sense of the collective resentments that makes this quiet, thoughtful book so powerful. On its publication, The Hiding Place looked to be a sleeper novel and, as Man Booker history testifies, it was.

Neither of her two highly accomplished and dark novels to date reflects the brighter aspects of Azzopardi's personality. Now at work on her third novel, and confident this literary business is her world, she ponders long and deep about life and its stories. The trick for her, it seems, is to climb into whatever story she is telling. "It's the life of the book I'm writing, not mine," she says. She can live outside her books, "but I write inside, within, the book; that's how I work".

Remember Me is published by Picador, £14.99 in UK

Trezza Azzopardi will be at the 2004 Cúirt International Festival of Literature, Galway, April 20th-25th (see panel, left)

Trezza Azzorpardi will read with Gerard Donovan, as part of this year's Cúirt International Festival of Literature, at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, next Wednesday at 2.30 p.m.

Other readings and events during the six-day festival include: Ivan Klima, Ewa Lipska and Eugene McCabe (Tuesday, April 20th, 8.30 p.m.), the Anne Kennedy Memorial Lecture on Yeats's European Legacy, by Roy Foster (Wednesday, 8.30pm), Jann Kaplinski and Pádraig Ó Siobhán (Thursday, 1 p.m.), Maireád Byrne and Tomaz Salamun (Thursday, 2.30 p.m.), Ferenc Juhász and Cathal Ó Searcaigh, (Thursday, 6.30 p.m.), Sven Birkerts and Alistair MacLeod (Thursday, 8.30 p.m.), Mila Haugova and George Szirtes (Friday, 1 p.m.), the Cuirt Debate on the Necessity of De-Anglicising Europe (Friday, 8.30 p.m.), Jan Morris (Saturday 2.30 p.m.), Julian Barnes and Neil Jordan (Saturday, 4 p.m.), Robert Pinsky and Tomas Venclova (Saturday, 6.30 p.m.), James Kelman and Lorrie Moore (Saturday, 8.30 p.m.).

All events are at the Town Hall Theatre.

Bookings on 091-569777. More details from www.galwayartscentre.ie/cuirt.