CHEERIO: Why the title Vulture?

PG: The term Vulture is a pretty scathing, self-deprecating way war journalists refer to themselves as people who make a living from conflict and disaster zones. This is a self-satirising book about war journalists, and Vulture describes that. 

 But birds in general also serve a significant function in the book. I've been in love with myth since childhood, where they often appear as messengers, like Odin's ravens: thought and memory. Living in the firmament, between the heavens and earth, they offer preternatural perspective. 

So it's a bird that gives us access to Sara's interiority: an insight into a soul she's too detached from to reveal to us. This bird is a manifestation of the sorrow and grief that Gaza confronts her with (sorry Max Porter, I promise I had this thought before I read you).

CHEERIO: In a woke world Sara is a complicated and sometimes unsympathetic character. Could you tell us more about her?

PG: Sara appears callous, unnervingly disconnected from the violence and tragedy unfolding around her. Hers is a confronting and sometimes unpleasant perspective. But I wrote her wondering if we're so different? As news consumers, we're all finding it difficult to process a catastrophe the size of Gaza. We're all at risk of being desensitised to the human reality of war zones reported to us as numbers, facts and politics. This is what that looks like.

Sara is a damaged person who causes tremendous harm. She can appear monstrous but really, she's doing what she believes is expected of her. She's doing her best according to the examples available to her. Like we all are. More and more we have a tendency to write people off for having wrong opinions, or for just being awful --- Trump supporters, Hamas apologists, Israeli soldiers, lifestyle bloggers. I do think we're going to have to make a greater effort to find some understanding, compassion, forgiveness for these others --- even people like Sara --- if we're going to start repairing that polarisation.

CHEERIO: Why did you choose to write VULTURE as fiction?

PG: I sat down to write the novel I'd always wanted to write in 2015, and Gaza just came out. It turned out there was a lot I needed to resolve about my own experience as a journalist there. Nagging questions, like what was I actually doing there? What was the use in reporting all those stories of suffering, individual tragedies, if they did nothing to stop them from happening?

There are strict rules around news reporting, put in place to ensure impartiality. These rules are essential to establish trust. But they leave little space for the complexity, messiness, humour, heartbreak that I saw in Gaza. 

Journalists aren't meant for feelings: in our mouths they sound like bias. But I had lots of them, knotty and complicated ones that I found I could only communicate as fiction. The Gaza I wrote in Vulture felt much closer to the place I knew and that was a relief to me.  

It's not a new idea that some very difficult truths, maybe Gaza included, are easier to digest as stories. 

CHEERIO: Humour is an important tool in the book, tell us more about that.

 PG: Black humour is endemic in war zones. There, as in the book, it create a distance from the relentless horror you're seeing necessary to describe and process it, analytically.

 Laughter, like crying, and sex, also functions as an urgently needed release. A safety valve.

 In 2015, I covered the migrant crisis in Greece. I was meeting families of Syrian refugees as they stepped off the Greek lifeboats. Volunteers were handing out care-packages with water, sandwiches, toothpaste. I was speaking to a family who had left everything they own behind them. As they were each handed a bar of soap, the entire family dissolved in fits of hysterical giggles. I couldn't understand it. Finally a daughter explained that her father had owned a soap factory.

 As Geoff the undertaker tells Sara in the book: laughing is so close to crying, in animal terms. And as the Greeks taught us, tragedy and comedy have always needed each other to be properly understood. 

CHEERIO: The book is set in Gaza in 2012 - how do you feel about the banning of journalists from Gaza now?

 I'm a huge believer in the vital importance of a free press, the importance of a healthy, functioning, independent media in general.  Vulture satirizes the war news industry, but out of care rather than malice. For me, the media matters too much not to be scrutinised and Vulture tries in its weird, dark way by scrutinising my own experiences as a journalist.

 Gaza is an era-defining conflict foreign press haven’t been able to access. But there are Palestinian journalists there, living it, being killed in extraordinary numbers live on our social media feeds.  Organisations like We Are Not Numbers are urging us to support the young Palestinian writers and journalists tell their own stories in English.

 As a British writer who for years relied heavily on the local fixers in Gaza to help me tell their own stories, I often felt an unease that worked its way out in Vulture. For me, this war has made nagging questions urgent: Is the word of a British or American journalist any more reliable than a journalist who’s lived that story all their lives? Are Palestinian journalists not independent simply because they are Palestinian? Is the killing of a Palestinian journalist less outrageous than the killing of a British reporter? Or even Jamal Khashoggi? 

 As Ta-Nehisi Coates argues so devastatingly in The Message, is it time for the West to rethink how it tells other people's tragedies?