a thousand ships a novel by natalie haynes

It was good enough for Ovid to focus on the stories of women in this precise conflict. Obviously it was good enough for Euripides to focus on the stories of women. Well, I mean, it's only a misappropriation of the classics if you don't think very much about classics, I would suggest. There's no reason why women - who have pretty well always been half the world - shouldn't be shown in the stories that we've been telling ourselves for a couple of millennia. But, you know, unfortunately, it remains extremely relevant to us today. When the book came out, a journalist asked me, you know, why should classics be relevant? Why should this book be relevant? I was like, mate, there's nothing I would like more for the story of women displaced by war to not be relevant anymore. That theme ran through writing A Thousand Ships for me. It looks like they're having to tolerate what they're given because there's no alternative. It doesn't look to me like these women are receiving any kind of justice. And they were then being asked essentially to live next door to the man who had killed their relatives and brutalized their bodies.Īnd all the way through this film, you know, years before I thought about writing A Thousand Ships, I remember thinking, I guess justice is one way of describing this. What I looked at was how these women who had obviously survived the war insofar as they were still alive, but they had been brutalized in the waging of that war. It was a film that I saw at the Cannes Film Festival, extremely harrowing and very impressive documentary about restorative justice in Rwanda, where there had been, of course, an absolutely horrific genocide.

It wasn't a vase, painting or a sculpture, a poem or anything else.

In a way, kind of, why should you? I suppose I mean, one of the things that inspired me when I wrote this book wasn't any ancient text. There's nothing I would like more for the story of women displaced by war to not be relevant anymore.

A thousand ships a novel by natalie haynes