×

Euan: And the fact that as a creative person, as a writer, you're going to start filling in the blanks with everything that you find. You can never even begin to know how it ended up in your hand, that thing you find on the foreshore. The story is… it's completely gone, completely.

Sophie: Gone. But people do piece it together, and it's so fascinating. You can find a pipe with a maker's mark on it, and this maker can be traced, and people have gone and found the factory where they used to work, or the place where they've been buried, found their last will and testament, discovered who they were married to. All this based off a tiny maker's mark. So there are so many stories, and we presume that stories get forgotten, but even with the smallest clue, sometimes a whole beautiful story can unfold from that which, as a writer, feels so magical.

Euan: That's such a nice way of looking at it. And it's also literally digging into history, isn't it?

Sophie: You don't know when you find an idea. Why? Why have you chosen this idea for, say, a novel? Ideally, ideas find you. You're not always in control of what you end up writing about. When you write the novel, this is something that pretty much takes over your life for at least two, three, five years. It's something that you really have to care about, but it's a very interesting process of having that moment of knowing that you found your idea and – how did you know this was the right story that you wanted to tell, and why?

Euan: That brings me on to something I wanted to discuss with you – historical fiction, writing about history, writing about real events. I read a quote by someone who, like you, lived in London and moved to the south coast. It was by Iain Sinclair, about his book Hackney, That Rose Red Empire.

Sophie: I've seen him talk. He's fascinating. And I lived in Hackney too, in Dalston.

Euan: So did I, actually. And you're in Kent now, aren't you?

SH: Yeah, down by the seaside.

Euan: The same as Iain Sinclair. He lived in Haggerston, and has a house in St Leonard's on Sea, that famous block, Marine Court, right on the front. Well, that book has some really amazing stories in it. Like the one about the Mole Man of Hackney. He dug huge tunnels from his basement under the roads, under other people's houses.

Sophie: Yes, oh my gosh, that was fascinating. What possessed him?

Euan: That was in Dalston too. Sinclair had this whole chapter in the book about how he went and met the Mole Man, and he went into his house, and got to go through the tunnels with him, and then looked out through a hole into a tube tunnel, and at that point I thought, this is incredible. And then: that doesn't quite sound true. And it was then I started to realise that reality was straying into fiction. I don't think it'd be possible to break into a tube tunnel. And later, somebody asked Sinclair how much of that book is true. And he said, 'Everything that needs to be true is true.'

Sophie: Wow.

Euan: And that's something that really informed me in my own work. I like that blur. In your first book, The Flames, about the muses of the Austrian artist Egon Schiele, you've got real people, people who lived. And what about your latest, Madame Matisse?

Sophie: That's also about real people. So, it's very personal.

Euan: So how do you approach that – with responsibility or freedom?

Sophie: Of course the responsibility is huge, because if you're tackling historical fiction, or what is essentially biographical fiction, these were real people. They had families, they had hopes, they had dreams, they had their own fate and their own life trajectories. And you do feel this weight when it comes to tackling their story. As an author, you feel a huge debt of responsibility to tell it in a way that is fair and accurate. But, of course, with a character like Egon Schiele, I couldn't know exactly what he said or thought in Vienna 100 years ago. So it's really difficult, because you end up doing a ton of research. I spent probably longer researching for The Flames, perhaps, than I did writing.

Euan: That's amazing.

Sophie: But you can end up feeling very constricted by the facts. You have to take a massive leap over the cliff as an author, to start being a storyteller. There's a difference between being a historian or a biographer. But if you're going to be an author, and if you're going to be somebody who wants people to turn the page of your novel, you have to tell a really compelling story. And for me, one of the big learning curves was to do exactly that, to let go of that. You have to say, 'I'm being respectful enough to have had a look at the facts, the artworks, and seen the dynamics at play there.' You have to be really confident to finally let go of the weight of responsibility and start telling a story.

Euan: Where do you look for inspiration or confirmation for this sort of thing?

Sophie: One of the things that gave me a lot of confidence was seeing how other creative projects do that. So, for example, The Crown: we lived through some of that history, and we know that wasn't exactly how these things happened, and we accept it because it’s compelling and telling very powerful stories. Also, say, Oppenheimer, this blockbuster film – Einstein was never in the same place as the guy who invented the atomic bomb, but wow, what an incredible scene. We want to see those people coming together. So I do think there's some creative licence. And to be really honest, I'm obsessed with this idea of delusion. I love delusion in my characters. I'd like to think I'm not a delusional human being, but I'm sure I have my own delusions. And I think it's really fascinating when you can be part of this blurring between fact and fiction. But it has to be done respectfully. It can't be this one-way process. I think there's a lot to be said for the way in which we're all creating a narrative around our own lives. In a family, say, an event can happen and five different people can see it from different perspectives. And that's always fascinated me. There is not just one truth. That's something I've always wanted to explore in fiction.

Euan: That's so true. And I think because you've done so much research, you could have just written a history of the four women.

Sophie: And a history misses so much, I think. Madame Matisse is about the women who inspired the great French artist. People have done incredible biographies of Henri Matisse, and I read them, and they were very factual, they were very interesting, and they had these amazing narrative arcs, but you have these details in Matisse's life that were stated so bluntly that they seem to miss all the emotion of what it might have felt to be a human being living through that experience. And I think that's what you get to do with historical or biographical fiction: you get to breathe the life and the emotion back into the facts. Sometimes that gets stripped away with pure history.

Euan: That's true. And if you write 'factual' history, especially if you have somebody super-famous, like Schiele or Matisse, someone else is going to write another biography, and they'll say, ‘You've got this totally wrong, this is what happened, why did you miss this.’ Because even the most rigorous of factual books is subjective. But, you're saying, 'Well, it doesn't matter,' because you've turned it into a fiction. That makes me think about one of the most important pieces of creative-writing advice I ever got. It was from a tutor at Goldsmiths. He said, 'Never show your workings. Just give the reader the results.' Like you did: more time researching than writing. Read it all, take it in, write it down, then cross it all out, and don't tell the reader any of it, but it'll inform the finished text.

Sophie: That's exactly what I did with Madame Matisse. When I was doing my copy edits, I kept coming up against these facts about Matisse's life, his artistic practice, where he was living. And I was thinking, this is really slowing the story down. And because I had it all in there, and because I had done the research, the assumption was that the reader will want to know or care. So I stripped out 10,000 words. It was meant to be a novel about dynamics and emotions and ultimatums. And once you take out that biography, it does form the backbone. Even if it isn't visible to the reader anymore, it does come through in the smallest details.

Euan: And you can do it creatively. If you were writing a biography, you'd have to say, Matisse started art school on this day, this place, whereas if you were writing a novel, you could tell us what the art teacher said to him on his first day.

Sophie: Precisely – you get the sense of people being created. Matisse didn't know he was going to be a household name at the age of 40; he still really hadn't made a name for himself, and he was pretty much the laughing stock of his community. His father died thinking his son had squandered all his chances. And it's fascinating to see people in those trajectories. Egon Schiele, for example, died at the age of 28. If Matisse had died at 28 nobody would ever have heard of him, because he wouldn't have had the impact on the world. And Schiele didn't know he was going to die so young. He only had a decade of making fantastic art. It's a poignant experience when you're dealing with real people.

Euan: Do you feel you can use fiction to fill in the gaps as well? Because there are times, even with somebody as famous as Schiele, where people don't know probably exactly what happened at certain points. There might be somewhere he went on a holiday, for instance, certain periods where there's no information, but you can go crazy with that, can't you?

Sophie: I think you can, if you wanted to, as an author, and if it was important to the plot of the story. I think one of the more compelling things to do is less, go crazy with what you don't know, and more paint over big gaps in time. So for me, nothing particularly happened for about 15 years of Matisse. And instead of trying to fill in all the gaps and make things up and fabricate what may or may not have happened, you sweep over 15 years of his life. It's not about doing these people a disservice by creating something that couldn't possibly have happened – they get abducted by aliens – but being respectful to what you think might have been a possibility and a likelihood.

Euan: I'm thinking about a book I read recently, by Jenny Fagan, called Luckenbooth. Do you know it? She's an amazing writer. She's got such an idiosyncratic style. The book is set in one close – a stairwell – in Edinburgh, full of different flats, over many years. The characters are mostly fictional, but one of them is William Burroughs, the American writer. He did go to Edinburgh a couple of times for a famous conference, but I've read a biography on him, and there's nothing much about that period. She's imagined this whole scenario with him visiting a house and buying heroin, living with a man. She did go a bit crazy, it seems, because all of it is made up. But these things could have happened. Do you think your journalism background helps with this?

Sophie: I really do. I talked earlier about the responsibility of dealing with living, breathing characters, but the opposite side of that is that you have these readymade narrative arcs. So, I'm in awe of authors who create everything from thin air, because my fear is that I couldn't necessarily do that easily. And I think the fact that these people lived – you get the names, you get their backstory. You get all these strange twists and turns along the way that would seem so improbable if you were making them up, but because they happened, you get to create more scenes around them. And I do think that really taps into the journalism mindset, because I'd been a journalist and one of my things was to interview people whose stories hadn't really been heard before. So I turned my attention to these women who lived in Vienna 100 years ago, who'd been silent for a century, but have been seen so explicitly in Egon Schiele's very provocative artworks. And when it came to getting to know these women, I did the research, and then it almost felt like I'm interviewing them – you've got all their life stories, you can put yourself in their shoes a little bit. It really taps into that journalistic mindset. But, I think it's a different skill set altogether when you have to make things up – you have to be a world builder and create everything from scratch.

Euan: Although everybody's always inspired in some way, aren't they, by something tangible? Well, we're all thieves. I was thinking about this last week, I was in Edinburgh, where I used to live. Waverley station is covered in quotes by Walter Scott. His novel Waverley is considered to be the first ever historical fiction, and apparently it made more money than any other book that's ever been printed because it was read so much. But it was interesting to look at the way that he did it – before that point, nobody had thought to insert fiction into real events. It was about the war in Scotland and the Highland Clearances and the Reformation. And it seems such an obvious thing, doesn't it, but it was revolutionary in that sense. I thought about how most historical fiction is about what you might call the main characters. I was thinking about Hilary Mantel and so on. And she could barely have chosen bigger characters to write about. And it’s clear that you are as interested in, if not more so, in the so-called minor characters, marginalised ones.

Sophie: I think Hilary Mantel also had a soft spot for the underdog. I think she took that powerful sphere of royalty in that world, and found the person who transcended all the power and then lost it again, which I think is a really interesting narrative arc. But I think that's it – shining a light on forgotten women, hidden stories. I think it's Charles Dickens who talks about these hidden corners – that's often where the most interesting stories lie.

Euan: And he was somebody else who went from London to Kent to find inspiration as well, didn't he?

Sophie: I think he wrote Little Dorrit in Folkestone, or part of it, at least. So that's our literary heritage.

Euan: I was reading about Sheppey, too, where he went: the absolute opposite end of Kent, where the prison hulks were moored, he wrote about that too.

Sophie: Agatha Christie as well.

Euan: Where was that?

Sophie: I think she stayed in one of the luxury hotels at the time, and wrote Murder on the Orient Express.

Euan: What I like about the south coast is the sense of space. You can see a big horizon or a big sky or something. You’re not so hemmed in.

Sophie: I really agree. I'd been hesitant about leaving London, and I felt quite apprehensive about moving to a seaside town in Kent, but it has been, by far and away, such a great decision, and it feels there's so much creativity here. There's so many interesting people, far more than I ever experienced in London, far more than I ever experienced in Dalston, which is meant to be the creative epicentre of London. It cascades over you with the waves. There's so much happening, and there's such a fantastic community. And I recently got a job that reflects that – curator of the book festival here.

Euan: Oh, amazing.

Sophie: So it's my dream job. This festival has been going since, I think, 1980 – it's one of the oldest book festivals in the UK, and I've got this free reign to pull together a 10- to 11-day programme of all my favourite writers and journalists and thinkers. It's been a bit ‘pinch myself’.

Euan: So although that’s writing related, it’s not actually writing, is it. I think non-writing time is as important – the thinking time. I'm always fascinated by the process. I remember reading about Graham Greene, who, by the end of his career was living in Capri and would write 500 words a day before breakfast, then spend the rest of the day swimming in the sea and drinking cocktails. What a life.

Sophie: You have to creatively fill the well, which is a Julia Cameron concept. You have to give yourself enough material in order to feel creative. If you take nothing else from her, the idea is that we can become very depleted creatively, and you do have to constantly be searching out, not new experiences, but following your curiosity. And when you're doing the things that you care about, or you're passionate about, or you're interested in, or even you're a bit intrigued by, you take such a fascinating path which leads you into completely new worlds that you wouldn't have been in otherwise. It's a good reminder not to get stagnant.

Euan: That also makes me think about the idea of research, because people might think of research as being, you go to an archive, or read biographies, or whatever. You go to galleries and look at everything that this person has ever painted, or look at their personal collections. But it can be more immersive or all-encompassing. For your book – did you go to Vienna, did you walk around?

Sophie: I did. I went twice. That's part of the research process for me. I absorb as much as I can. And you make notes, you do try to remember as much of it as possible, you mark up the pivot points where you see a life changing, or somebody becoming something that they hadn't quite expected, or where it could have gone into different directions. You have to synthesise it all, forget everything else we were talking about, the research and the biography, you've got to then concentrate on these key emotional moments. And it's that synthetic nature of it that makes it something that processes the story out in that way.

Euan: Because I feel like that's where the story is as well. If you were on the street in Vienna or in a cafe, you might see one thing that could inspire you, and you would find a whole scene or just a tiny detail that you could put in, and it could change. Although having said that, I remember reading about Nathan Englander. Do you know him? He wrote a book called The Ministry of Special Cases, and it was set in Argentina during the disappearances, the 70s and 80s. But he never went there. That's what I thought was so fascinating. He'd never been there. But then, I was thinking, Well, Isaac Asimov never went to space, and he managed to write about it.

Sophie: Oh, precisely. This image that we have of it. I think that is really interesting. I think that would be very difficult for me, because even if you don't end up using any of the stuff that you've seen or whatever, you have that framework in your head. You have the picture, you have that layout and mapping. And I think in a way, you need to know that, because otherwise you lose confidence. It’s a confidence trick.

Euan: Confidence – you're exactly right, because I think if you put a detail in there that was really wrong, even if the person reading it had never been to Vienna, for instance, there might be something about it that wasn't convincing. And if you can't convince people that you're building a world, and you can't convince them that it's a real world, then it doesn't work, does it?

Sophie: That always came as a surprise. People would say, oh my gosh, this novel is so evocative of Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, and I was thinking, is it? I don't feel I did anything special. I didn't try and put any special details in, just a little bit of scene setting here and there. If I'd been trying to be very evocative about Vienna, I’d probably end up going over the top, and you probably put in too much, and people skipping whole chapters because I was doing too much of the showing and not enough telling. So it's interesting how far a few very elegant brushstrokes can go.

Euan: And I think we're not going to come up with great ideas if we sit doing admin all day. The creativity is everywhere, isn't it? But it's not always in your head or in your house, and it's about finding it.

Sophie: Definitely follow those little paths of interest.

Euan: Absolutely. That’s a great note to end on. Inspiration for everyone, whether they’re writers or not. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.

Madame Matisse is published now by Penguin. Folkestone Book Festival is 13 to 23 November 2025.

FURTHER READING