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WRITER

Expat life inspires Geneva-based writer

After living in many places, New York-born writer Anne Korkeakivi is now based in Geneva, where she speaks to The Local about how being an expat inspired her first novel, An Unexpected Guest.

Published: 28 April 2014 08:00 CEST
Expat life inspires Geneva-based writer
Anne Korkeakivi. Photo: Handout

Anne Korkeakivi never tires of the mountain view from the backyard of her home in Geneva.

The scenery is “quite literally awe-inspiring”, says the novelist, who was born and raised amid the towers of Manhattan.

Since Korkeakivi and her family moved to Switzerland almost five years — for her husband’s job as a human rights lawyer with the UN — she has not only been enjoying the country’s beauty.

She has also published her first novel: An Unexpected Guest (Little, Brown; 2012).
 
“I began the novel while living in France during the Iraq War,” says Korkeakivi, who has a background as a journalist and short story writer.



“It was a particularly complex time to be an American expatriate. While the novel is filled with the beauty of Paris, this more difficult face of being an expat is in there too.”
 
Set within the international diplomatic community in Paris a few months after the London Underground bombings, the novel has elements of a literary thriller.

It follows Clare Moorhouse as she arranges an official dinner crucial to her husband’s career as a high-ranking British diplomat.
 
“I was walking down the elegant Rue de Varenne in Paris, location of both the French Prime Minister’s residence and the Rodin museum, thinking about the political scandals headlining the news,” says Korkeakivi.



“The idea behind the novel popped into my head.”
 
Clare is guarding a serious secret that could ruin her and her husband: a central theme of the book is how people deal with their pasts.



But An Unexpected Guest also explores the “distinct” experience of life as an expat, Korkeakivi says, and particularly as an expat with dual-nationality children.
 
Korkeakivi, whose husband is Finnish and who has also lived in cities such as Strasbourg and Helsinki, admits that although people “back home” speak with envy about her lifestyle, there are difficult elements to it, too.
 
“My life feels very rich for having lived and spent time in many different places,” she says.



“But living as an expat isn’t like being on an endless holiday. One difficult element is the distance placed between yourself and friends and family, and also sometimes between yourself and your work colleagues.”
 
While living in Strasbourg, Korkeakivi couldn’t work as a journalist without excessive travelling.

To be at home with her small children, she took a freelance editing job to give herself time to develop her voice in fiction – something she had been stealing moments to write for years.
 
“Becoming a novelist has always been my goal,” she says.

“I gave myself a year and started with short stories. In the 12th month, I received my first short story acceptance for publication.”
 
The stories went on to run in publications including The Yale Review and The Atlantic. One of them, Folding Paper, is largely set in Geneva. 
 
Meanwhile, Korkeakivi set to work on An Unexpected Guest, spending the best part of a year “getting to know” her heroine Clare, and then some nine months writing a complete first draft.  
 
The book launched in America in April 2012. And Korkeakivi presented the novel – which has an international English edition – to Switzerland’s book lovers during a reading at Off The Shelf in Geneva the following month.

“There was lots of discussion: the audience deeply related to my book’s expat situation,” she says.
 
In May, she will participate in a similar event at Orell Füssli, The Bookshop in Zurich, in conjunction with the annual Zurich Writers Workshop, where she will be 2014’s fiction instructor.
 
She is also working on her next novel: “It will explore the effect of a historical event on an American family, and travel from southern California to Scotland’s Inner Hebrides,” she reveals.

No Switzerland? “I rarely write about where I physically am situated,” she replies.
 
Korkeakivi will be speaking and signing books at Orell Füssli, The Bookshop (Bahnhofstrasse 70, 8001 Zurich) on May 23rd (www.books.ch); Zurich Writers Workshop runs from May 24th – 25th (www.zurichwritersworkshop.com)
 
Chat to Anne Korkeakivi on Twitter @annekorkeakivi or find out more at www.annekorkeakivi.com

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BOOKS

How I ditched London and became a writer in Berlin

Former Berlin resident Sarah Kisielowski tells of how a move to the German capital provided the inspiration she needed to write her first novel.

Published: 11 October 2016 12:00 CEST
How I ditched London and became a writer in Berlin
File photo: DPA.

“I’m going to become a writer,” I told my boss in London. I’m moving to Berlin to write a book.

A month later at my farewell party, he gave me a bunch of flowers, along with a pat on the back for being 20-something and following my dreams. Ten years later, my dream has come true, and looking back, moving to Berlin had everything to do with it.

A lot of people come to Berlin in search of creative input, hungry for the history and artistic freedom that the city has to offer. They hang out in cafes and bars and explore the romantic urbanism that makes Berlin so addictive: the tree-filled neighbourhoods of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, the industrial wastelands, and canal-side haunts.

All these people from different countries and backgrounds come together, bound by the city as it perpetually writes its story on the lives of its residents.

“Berlin was different when I moved here,” many people say, and yes, in 2006 when I turned up with a backpack and a job as an English teacher, the city was different: the Communist Palast der Republik still stood on Museum Island, more people seemed to speak German, and there were a lot more outdoor parties. But I was different back then too and to me, everything in Berlin was new.

I picked up my first bike for €10 off an elderly lady in my Altbau and, by the end of my first week living in Kreuzberg, I was cycling around the streets of my Kiez like a pro, and falling in love with the city.

There was so much to write about: the smells and sounds of the streets, Kofte from the Turkish market and fresh rolls from the bakeries. Characters popped out of every kiosk, they slept on the stones of war memorials. Stolpersteine before many houses marked the homes of former Jewish residents, and the dates they were terrorized by the Nazis.

Street names like Grimmstrasse were an ode to the fairy tales of the German storytellers the Brothers Grimm, who lived in the city for two decades. And U-Bahn station names like Frankfurter Tor marked an old route out of the city towards the provinces of the East.

With so much for my imagination, I spent my first year simply living and experiencing my new environment. I connected with most of the people I met through a shared love of music and literature. Their book recommendations still remind me of the places where we first discussed them over a Milchkaffee and cigarettes, warming up from the cold. Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler is a café on Kottbusserdamm. Talk Talk by T. C. Boyle is a tram ride half-way-down Petersbergerstrasse. And then my favourite: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut: a bitter night walking along Eberswalderstrasse.

Photo: David Benham/Private.

Being half-German myself, there were some things about the city that seemed familiar from my childhood trips to see my grandparents: pumpkin seed bread and poppy seeds – favourites of my mother; then there was the chocolate bars we’d been sent as children; and the sound of the language itself.

But so many things were different from home: the apartments in Berlin were enormous and full of the smell of coal. When winter came the canals froze in Kreuzberg, and I felt for the first time that I really knew what winter was.

Lost in a dark and snowy world, I began to write vignettes of the characters and places I came across: the abandoned factories and buildings, inside which I would sit for hours, scribbling away on scraps of paper.

I read Döblin and Isherwood, and went to flea markets to buy a fur coat. I watched films by German directors like Wenders and Herzog, and spent afternoons on the S-Bahn observing life. A homeless man sat on the stairs at Treptower Park, begging each day for breakfast. The sound of a violinist filled the vaulted ceiling of a station as the horsehair of his bow glided across the strings.

The people and cold of the city breathed humanity into my everyday life in a way I’d never seen before.

And I too had to survive, in a flat with no real heating. I didn’t make a lot of money from my teaching job, but it was reliable, and enough to pay the rent. Looking back, I hardly had anything, but in other ways I had so much. I was rich in only a way that living in Berlin can teach you. On my days off I explored the city, then went home and wrote all night. And gradually I became a Berliner with a common sense of belonging running through my blood.

Four years later, I returned to London and began to write. I wrote eight hours a day for three months. The story started from a photograph, a vision, and ended in a book. It took four more years of research and return trips to Berlin to finish my debut novel. But now that it’s done it, it feels like only last week that I first cycled down Wrangelstrasse with the leaves of the linden trees crunching under my wheels.

Fulfilling a dream takes hard work and perseverance. The people of Berlin gave me the inspiration to do that. Of course, every city has its stories, but none more so for me than Berlin, where every doorstep holds a secret, every face is lined by the past.

The Last Tenant by Sarah Kisielowski tells the story of Daniel, a young man who travels to Berlin in search of family. But when his grandfather disappears, Daniel must dig through remnants of the past to find out the truth about his family's history. Find out more at http://www.fragmentpress.co.uk.

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