EDUCATION CORNER PODCAST
EDUCATION CORNER PODCAST INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR
Elizabeth Laird write the book until the late 80s, when I watched Kurdish people return to their villages after Saddam Hussein had taken them to concentration camps. It was very moving. Upon my return to London, I interviewed Iraq refugees to get their stories. I always feel that with books like that, I have witnessed some of the greatest stories of our time. During the 1990s you travelled round Ethiopia collecting folk stories from traditional storytellers, and the British Council produced them in a series of readers for Ethiopian schools. A selection for a wider audience was published as When The World Began: Stories Collected in Ethiopia (2000). Do you want to tell us a little more about this?
Elizabeth Laird talks to us about her longstanding career as an author and the personal experiences that have led to her writing about topical issues related to refugees, plastic pollution and the inspiration for her latest book… You have written many books that are realistic and explore contemporary events, such as war, homelessness and the experience of refugees. You have lived and worked in many countries including Malaysia, Ethiopia, India, Iraq, Lebanon, and Austria. How do you feel this has impacted your writing?
It has been completely seminal to my writing. The first novel I wrote set in a foreign country was Kiss The Dust, which was set in Iraq, just after we’d visited Iraq-Kurdistan in the 1970s, although I didn’t 50 | EDUCATION CHOICES MAGAZINE | S U M M E R 2 02 2
I lived in Ethiopia. I taught there back in the 1960s; I’m terribly old. I loved the country, and travelled very widely. When I returned, I was entranced all over again. I met the chancellor of the British Council in Addis Ababa, and I suggested to him that it would be great to get stories and produce readers. He enthusiastically took me up on this and provided translators and transport. I went back there five times and took five month long journeys to the farthest corners of Ethiopia collecting stories from farmers, prisoners in a prison and even, in Gonda, herdsmen in the desert areas. They were incredible journeys and I collected these wonderful folk stories. I have written a book about those journeys, but it’s one for grown-ups. It’s called Lure of the Honeybird. What was so exciting for me, was that I might be sitting in a village (in the middle of nowhere) and somebody will be telling me a story, I could talk about this forever but I won’t, and it would start with people who had thrown leaves into a lake to stun the fish to catch them, and the water parted from the left and the right, and they walked in. I thought, TURN TO P53 to hear about the Ukraine School
