I detest death. It's been around us all my life, invading our slightest movements. Unknown dead people dominated my childhood and adolescence. All th… - Évelyne Trouillot

I feed off of my observations, above all. Sometimes it just takes a remark for an idea for a story or a character to arise. Or unconsciously I store things away and the next time I sit down to write, they come back to me. Obviously writing is a digestion of our experiences. Certain characters of mine draw on the image I have of people in my life...But I think that what makes a text interesting is its capacity to go beyond one’s own experiences, to succeed in sharing a different world. This requires a lot of sensitivity, and also self-knowledge. Writing allows me to better understand the world in which I developed. If I really want to create meaning, I must be honest with myself, and not present a simplistic version of things. Most of the time this means setting aside my own experiences, transcending them.

This image of the condemned books remains for me one of the strongest images of the repression, this repression of knowledge and of creative freedom. Isn’t that one of the strongest armies used by dictators everywhere?

I like this back and forth between the past and the present, between memory and reality.