The Foreshore Interview: Shivan Davis

How would you introduce On Winter Hill to your readers, and what do you hope they will take away from it?

I would probably introduce On Winter Hill as a meditation on first love and friendship. I’d describe it as a coming-of-age story grounded in a sense of place. Hopefully readers will find it true to life and enjoy spending time in the company of the main characters. 

Can you remember what the seed of this was, as a novel?

The seed of the novel arrived through a dream. I keep a notebook beside my bed to record particularly vivid or profound dreams and this particular dream ended up being the final chapter of the novel. I hastily wrote down the gist of it and knew almost immediately that I had the essence of a novel in my hands. In a sense it made the writing process of the first draft easier as I knew how the story had to end, I just had to work out a route towards arriving at that destination. 

What inspired the choice to use an idyllic setting to explore such unsettling themes?

I followed the age-old wisdom of “write what you know”. As well as that, I always felt the need for the action of the novel to occur from around May to September. The novel charts the memories of the narrator so it was important that the events I described took place against a familiar backdrop for me to build a world around the characters.

The theme of grief pervades the novel. What inspired this decision?

Alongside providing a framing device for the novel, I hoped that the theme of grief  would intensify the memories of the narrator and explain his decision in the prologue to meditate on this episode of his life. 

The recollections of the main character Sahil and his first love Elena, their getting to know each other, that initial attraction , the intensity of their conversations, are the mainstay of the novel. How were they to write, and where did these characters come from?

The characters in the novel, including the narrator are either semi-autobiographical, literary composites or entirely invented. Sahil is fairly autobiographical although I have deposited parts of myself in a number of the characters, particularly George. I really enjoyed writing the dialogue between Sahil and Elena. I knew from the beginning that I wanted the novel to take place over the course of a single summer which meant that the progression of their relationship had to develop quickly and intensely without straining the reader’s credulity which was tricky. In terms of the source of where they come from, I suppose I took the stuff of life, remolded it and embellished it. 

Sahil and Elena losing their virginity together plays quite a crucial role, symbolically in the novel. What was your thinking around this and what it means to Sahil?

It definitely serves to make their relationship more intimate and comfortable— something reflected in the ease of their dialogue in the subsequent chapters. I think it’s an event that means more to Sahil than Elena. It makes the ending more painful for the narrator and the overarching storyline more meaningful, at least that was my intention. 

Your work is elegantly and thoughtfully written, so how much time do you spend crafting your sentences, on average and at the most?

I learned a lot about the writing process through this novel, in particular just how much of the process boils down to editing and redrafting. ‘On Winter Hill’ went through a number of redrafts and, in terms of crafting sentences, what helped pare the writing down was reading the manuscript aloud, time and time again, and being subsequently directed by the ear, not the eye. 

Are there writers whom you admire or have influenced your writing?

A few novels in particular influenced On Winter Hill, namely ‘The Leopard’, ‘Nevermind’, ‘The Country Girls’, ‘My Antonia’, ‘Old School’, ‘Mayflies’ and ‘Giovanni’s Room’. In terms of my favourite writers, I’d have to name Cormac McCarthy, Edward St Aubyn, Edna O’Brien, Clare Keegan and James Baldwin.

On Winter Hill by Shivan Davis is published by Foreshore in March in paperback.