22 July 2015

Author Q&A Session #51: With Philip Kazan



Good evening everyone,

Hope you're having a great day. In another new author Q&A Session, today we have the author who re-creates Florence vividly and strikingly with his stories that not only traces the outline of a beautiful and elegant city but also takes us back in time in a different era. Yes Philip Kazan is here to talk about art, his objectives, his books and his life beyond books and all. So stay tuned and keep reading the interview.

Read the review of The Painter of Souls





  
Me: Hello and welcome to my blog, Philip. Congratulations on your latest book, The Painter of Souls? Please share with us the story behind your novel, The Painter of Souls?

Philip:
Thanks for inviting me here!

The Painter of Souls is a kind of prequel to my last novel, Appetite. I had the idea for Appetite while working in a restaurant which my wife and I owned. I was making Italian sausages, looking out at some truly horrible winter weather (we were in northern New England) and wishing I was in Italy. While I was daydreaming about Florence I remembered something I had recently discovered: that Filippo Lippi, the great painter, had been the son of a butcher. So Appetite was originally conceived as a book about a man who is torn between two disciplines: cooking and painting. In the end I made the hero, Nino, a cook and not an artist, but I put Filippo Lippi in as his uncle. Even though Lippi appears very briefly, he was such a pleasure to write about that I thought it would be enormous fun to write a whole book, or books, about him.


Me: What inspired you to pen a novel about Fra Filippo Lippi- a great painter from second generation Renaissance period?

Philip:
I've loved Filippo Lippi ever since I first went to Florence aged about 15. Florence is bursting with incredible art but there's a quality to Lippi that is absolutely unique. He has an odd combination of purity and humanity. His faces are beautiful but they aren't idealised: they are real people. And of course he had, reputedly, an amazing life. He's supposed to have been captured by pirates and painted his way to freedom, and all sorts of other things that never actually happened. But he was obviously a fairly dramatic person. He did grow up on the streets of Florence. The great Cosimo de' Medici was a great admirer. He was tortured for forging a contract, and apparently had a son with a nun. We know almost nothing else (that might seem like enough), which of course makes him very tempting as a subject for fiction!


Me: Did you travel extensively to Florence for the purpose of research? And what's the best thing about Florence that interests you?

Philip:
I didn't actually go to Florence to research The Painter of Souls. I was planning to, but - this almost never happens! - I wrote the book so quickly that I didn't get around to the actual trip. Which was a great shame as I'd really been looking forward to it. It's a wonderful city and I'd been dreaming of revisiting my favourite restaurants. Oh, well...

Having said that, I don't believe it's strictly necessary to do on-the-ground research when writing about the relatively distant past. I used my own very vivid impressions from previous visits, and of course the internet is an incredible resource. I did a great deal of research into 15th Century Florence, mostly from academic texts - I think it's really important to get the details as correct as possible. But 21st Century Florence isn't 15th Century Florence and sometimes I've found it harder to write about the imagined past of a place I know well in the present: there's always the danger of making things anachronistic. And I also think that imagination is the writer's most important tool: conjuring up a place in my head and writing it down is more satisfying, and possibly more dramatic, than just describing something I'm looking at.

There are many things I love about Florence but the one thing that always amazes me is how small it is. It's a fairly big city now but the old walled centre is really tiny, especially when you consider the immense cultural impact it's had on European culture. I also love the light, the food, the odd glimpses of ancient palaces through rickety old gateways, the Fra Angelico frescos in San Marco, orange trees in cloisters... I could go on, but I'd better not!


Me: Tell us one trait of Fra Filippo Lippi that intrigues you the most.

Philip:
His ability to bring out such radiant, transcendent beauty in his subjects, which I think has to be because of his own humanity. Here's a boy growing up on some of the roughest streets of Florence, at a time when the life of a homeless person must have been brief and extremely unpleasant, and coming through that experience with the ability, and the desire, to show the best in people.


Me: What did you expect your readers to learn about after reading your novel, The Painter of Souls?

Philip:
I would love people to come away with the urge to see Filippo Lippi's art - or the work of any great painter - for themselves, to perhaps spend a little time in front of a wonderful painting and see what happens.


Me: How will you describe your journey so far as an author? Was it always your one true dream to be an author?

Philip:
Strangely enough, it really was my dream to become an author. My father wrote screenplays and I was a very early reader and so books have been part of my life for almost exactly as long as I can remember. And very early on I thought 'I'd love to do this myself.' Having said that, I put off trying to write for a long time. In my teens I was much more likely to have become a professional musician than an author, and afterwards I did all sorts of work before surrendering to the inevitable. I can't actually imagine doing anything else, and I still can't quite believe I'm doing it at all, to the extent that I look at my published books and wonder if I actually wrote them. So I suppose it's still a dream, in a way.


Me: What other passions do you have apart from writing?

Philip:
Lots! Passions are a good thing. I'm passionate about my family. Music, art... I'm a very passionate gardener, I love to cook, and I suppose most of all I love to explore new ideas, to learn new things. In so far as there's any meaning to life (that's a whole other subject), I think that's it: the opportunity to keep on learning.


Me: How will you describe your normal writing schedule? And what do you do to get away from the stress of a long day's work?

Philip:
A normal work day for me is wake up, drink a lot of coffee, take the kids to school, sit down in front of my computer and... I wait. Sometimes I have to wait a long time, sometimes the words come quickly. Then I write until I've filled my daily quota, which ideally is a lot, with pauses to walk the dog and pick up the kids. I have a long-suffering family who understand that I might be sitting in front of them at my desk but I'm not actually there! To unwind, I tend to go outside: I live in the country and there's always something that needs doing: fences, stone walls to build, trees to cut down. I love plants so I spend a lot of time planning grand flowerbeds that somehow never look quite like I imagine them! And I meditate when I can.


Me: What's next up on your writing sleeves? Please tell us briefly about it.

Philip:
I'm intensely superstitious about writing (and about nothing else, I hasten to add) so I'm going to dodge the question, except to say that it's something more modern and, in a way, more personal. After that, I've always wanted to write something set in India. And more adventures of Fra Filippo are a possibility.


Me: Thank you so much Philip for joining me today on this interview session. I wish you luck for all your future endeavors.


Philip:
Thank you so much for having me, Aditi! It's been a great pleasure.

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Philip's Bio:


Pip Vaughan-Hughes was born in London in 1964 and grew up in Devon. Pip also writes under the name Philip Kazan. He studied Medieval History at London University. Having been warned by his family that he should on no account ever become a freelance writer, he worked in the publishing industry in London and New York, dabbled in landscape gardening and journalism and co-owned a restaurant in Vermont, before he decided that the best advice is the advice that you ignore, and turned to writing full time.


Pip is the author of Relics, Vault of Bones, Painted in Blood, and The Fools’ Crusade (the Petroc of Auneford quartet) and Appetite. He now lives on the edge of Dartmoor with his wife, three children and a very large black cat.




Connect with Philip on: Website | Goodreads | Facebook 
 

2 comments:

  1. So thrilled to read this interview. What an interesting read. Doesn't the book and now hearing what the author has to say really inspire a visit to Florence? (off to book tickets, sadly #notreally). Thank you Adiit for such an interesting interview!

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  2. Thanks so much Trip Fiction. Yes, this book makes me wanna visit Florence so badly! Alas...I can't right now **sob**sob** :-(

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