John Boyne: "The day I finished 'The Boy in the Striped Pajamas' I already thought about the second part, but I still didn't feel ready"

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The day after concluding his greatest literary success,

,

already knew how the story would continue.

However, it took him more than a decade to write it: "I didn't feel ready," he admits.

Now yes.

He now enjoys the life he always dreamed of as a child:

.

He can even treat himself to spending one term a year in Adelaide (Australia) to enjoy the sun that his native Ireland deprives him of.

From there he affirms, via Zoom, that he is a happy man who has had a "wonderful" life, despite the fact that he suffered sexual abuse in adolescence by a teacher, and that he suffered the rejection of an ultra-Catholic environment for his homosexuality.

Boyne rose to fame 17 years ago thanks to

translated into 57 languages ​​and with 11 million copies sold.

Readers from all over the world remember the friendship between the young protagonists, Jewish and German, on both sides of the barbed wire of the Auschwitz extermination camp.

But what happened to Bruno's older sister?

"Not even my editor," he confesses.

But Gretel's story "deserved to be told."

Through it, its author travels from the Paris of 1946 to the London of 2022 in search of a place where the terrible past merges with the "less terrible" present.

He doesn't bother me at all, because I think most writers don't even get a bestseller.

A book that will stand the test of time, that everyone knows.

That excites me a lot.

I am also glad that it dealt with such an important topic and that so many people have read it.

Almost 20 years later, people are still reading it and talking about it.

It is an extraordinary thing.

I don't think it's my best book and, in fact, it's not the favorite of my most faithful readers.

But no, I would never disown him or anything like that.

I am very proud.

Well, I imagine that my readers will have grown.

(laughs) Or I hope so, it would be a little weird if they were still young.

It's a joke.

Yes, I think they will enjoy it and that the new generations will too.

I have presented

in many schools, I still think it is a good introduction to the subject of the Holocaust.

I have always insisted, when I go to schools, to make it clear to the children that it is a fable.

Which is not exactly how things happened.

There are many other books that you should read later if you are interested in them.

But I hope that the second part will be as well received among young people as the first.

Of course there have been critics.

I insist that I have never intended to scare them, but I think we have to be sensible.

Most of the books, if not all of the books I've written for young people, are about children going through adult experiences sooner than they should.

And the reality is that many children do.

Whether it is those who are living through the war in Ukraine or those grieving the death of a parent at a young age, children unfortunately have adult experiences.

It is so.

I think a writer for young people should be able to reflect that, because our books can maybe help them through a particularly difficult time they're going through.

It is a great responsibility for the writer, but also a great privilege.

Yes of course.

I have met many Holocaust survivors over the years, and it has been an incredible privilege to hear their stories.

Many have come to my book presentations.

They often tell me how grateful they are that people like me keep young people interested in what happened by spending part of our lives talking about it.

Whether it's writing books or making movies, we're committed to never forgetting it and keeping these stories alive.

I imagine that the survivors or the families of the victims feared that time would end up erasing the wounds of the war.

But our generation has worked so that this is not the case, and the next one is doing it too.

The writer John Boyne.Roberto Ricciuti

I guess many of the phobias out there weren't written about in the past.

The biggest names in the literary firmament were white, straight writers, mostly Americans.

They were all very talented writers, but too focused on their own life experience.

There weren't that many well-known writers who were women, gay, or of color.

So I think the fact that readers today are demanding more diversity in terms of their literature, in terms of what bookstores are promoting, has been a really positive thing.

And the editors too.

Publishers actively reach out to minorities in a way that may not have been possible in the past.

It's curious.

If you want to get published today, the hardest part is being a straight white writer.

But hey, they already got away with it for a long time.

No, I think Hitler is unique in his own right in terms of the extraordinary number of murders for which he was responsible.

And I don't think anything should be compared to the Nazis.

You know, the Nazis were Nazis.

Today there is a tendency to claim that anyone who disagrees with something is a Nazi.

When people compare anything to the Nazis or Hitler, they are being very lazy and ignorant of history.

We must acknowledge that the Nazis and Hitler had an unprecedented level of evil at the time.

It is better not to extrapolate it to contemporary situations.

Putin is not a nice guy, not at all, but he is not Hitler.

Hitler is an extreme case.

Well, what surprises me about Roald Dahl is that there are people who ask for that to happen.

I don't recall reading any articles suggesting that his books should be changed.

I think it's an act of cultural vandalism.

Any kind of art, be it books, paintings, movies or plays, they are all products of his own time.

And we cannot change them just to fit the contemporary moral climate.

We can disagree with them, of course.

We can read something and decide that we don't want to continue reading because it offends our particular sensibilities.

But if you change a word in a Roald Dahl book, then it was not written by Roald Dahl, but by someone else.

And I don't think it's right, in fact, I think it's very morally corrupt.

Yes. Sometimes I think we live in the business of treating people like children so they can't make their own decisions.

We even treat the children themselves as babies, confusing infantilization with victimhood.

It's ridiculous.

I don't think publishers should have the right to change books even if Dahl's estate allows it, nor do we readers should accept it.

If people read my books 100 years after I'm dead, I don't want them to be rewritten to reflect something I didn't think of or write.

It's completely dishonest.

And it is that I refuse to have my name appear on the cover of something that I have not written.

If I have made a mistake, the mistake is mine and no one else's, I don't want someone to come and change it.

It is a very slope,

very slippery the one we went down when we started doing this kind of thing.

Where are we going to end up?

Yes, I've already written a few books from a female perspective, and I'm doing it more and more.

I feel comfortable with it.

In fact, the book I'm finishing writing now is also narrated by a woman.

Obviously I'm not a woman, but I'm a gay man.

I have feelings similar to yours.

I guess traditionally underrepresented people stick together.

Half the planet are women, but throughout history, the voices of women have been drowned out by heterosexual men.

So I try to write very strong female characters in my books: smart, complicated, brave, troubled women, like Gretel.

Although she is a somewhat hateful character with a complicated past, she is not stupid.

She has waited her whole life for the time to atone for her guilt,

But she's not willing to let anyone walk all over her.

I think more male writers should make the effort to create better female characters.

? Not at all.

This second part is something I've been planning for many years.

The day I finished the first draft of

I already thought that I would want to go back to Gretel.

She had abandoned her at the end of the book at the age of 12 and completely traumatized.

But I also felt that it was something that I couldn't write when I was younger.

I was in my thirties then, now I am 51 years old.

I am older, wiser and have more experience as a writer.

The first book sins of a youthful ingenuity and this one has more maturity.

I think so, at least.

Now I am a different person.

I waited for the right time to write it, but no one ever required it of me.

In fact, I would say that out of all my books, this is the one people least expected a sequel to because of the ending it had.

But when I spoke to my publisher in the UK and presented some initial chapters to him, he read them and asked me to continue writing.

It was exciting to go back to Gretel's family and revisit some of the characters from the first book.

Even though it deals with a very dark subject, it's actually a very special book for me because I wanted to see where it would go.

I liked her voice, I liked the person who wrote.

He's not a perfect human being, but who is?

We are all extremely complicated.

It is not so easy to distinguish between heroes and villains:

We all have things in our lives that we're not entirely proud of, ashamed of, or regretful of.

All of this must be reflected by a writer.

I'd say I'm in pretty good mental health.

I have experienced difficult times in the past.

Really difficult.

I have written about them, about the things that happened to me as a teenager at school, about the abuse I suffered there and the homophobia I experienced.

I have also written about my marriage breakup, which was a very painful experience.

But most of my life, outside of those episodes, is very happy.

I have a wonderful family, many friends and a job that I love.

I think that I have been able to overcome difficult moments because many good things are also happening to me in life and I have managed to convince myself of this.

I have the life I wanted as a child: to be a full-time writer.

Publish twenty books.

Going to Australia for three months with no other concern than writing.

Of course, there are moments when I start to think about my past traumas, but most of them I have overcome precisely by writing.

My relationship with literature is based on learning about the human experience to try to understand it better.

I think most of them, yes.

But there are probably one or two that I'd still like to put together.

Well, what's missing in my life right now is a partner.

I would love to have it.

It is not something that overwhelms me constantly.

But if I could find someone out there to share the good and the bad with, that would be great.

Look, I know we can't have everything in life.

I have made peace with myself.

I tell myself that I am relatively young and I still have a lot of time ahead of me.

Hopefully 40 years, at least.

Not for the moment.

There have been some conversations but, you know, anything can happen with these things.

So I don't think much about it.

I have several novels in different stages of development, and I always say that until I'm in a theater with popcorn in hand, I'm not going to worry about supposed projects.

Anything that makes novels reach more and more readers is always a good thing.

But I'm not a filmmaker.

I am a novelist.

I am more interested in the translations of my books that they reach the cinema.

I like traveling and seeing my book translated into Spanish, Greek, French or Korean, and being able to reach a global audience through my stories.

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