Ledia Xhoga interview: ‘Sometimes, while writing, I’ll turn on a black and white movie and let it play on mute’

The inspirations behind my Booker-longlisted book 

The main character in Misinterpretation is an unnamed Albanian translator and interpreter who works with immigrants. I have never worked professionally as an interpreter or translator, but I volunteered briefly for an organisation in New York City that asked me to interpret for a Kosovar Albanian whose background was similar to Alfred’s. Although we didn’t end up meeting, the situation stuck with me and inspired the first scene in the novel where the interpreter meets Alfred in Washington Square Park in Manhattan. The novel flowed after that scene. I took it as a sign that I was on the right track, that the story was ready to be told.  

The book that made me fall in love with reading 

I have a vivid memory of borrowing Roald Dahl’s The Big Friendly Giant from the library, reading it while walking home, and hitting a pole with my head. Hoping nobody noticed, I put the book away at once, but a second later a friend caught up with me. She was laughing hysterically. I enjoyed fantasy and adventure books, especially the ones that presented some moral dilemma or the fight against oppression. 

The book that made me want to become a writer 

Reading, at first, discouraged me from wanting to be a writer. As a child, when I’d read a book I particularly loved, I’d think – what a good deal I’m getting now. I’m sitting here doing nothing, yet I’m in this other world. The writer had to imagine everything, write lines and lines of dialogue and descriptions! I did enjoy writing poems and short prose for school assignments but never considered writing as a career. Much, much later on, I remember picking up Samantha Hunt’s The Seas and admiring the skill it took to create such deliberate, exquisite prose and starting to think of writing as a craft. To be clear, I did not think oh yeah, I can do that. I was infinitely more hesitant and intimidated. But it made me think about the possibility. And I still love her writing.  

The book I read again and again? 

Middlemarch by George Eliot. I’m a bit obsessed with Dorothea Brooke and how her pious empathy is a strong motivation in everything she does, whether it is improving the cottages of farmers in her uncle’s 19th-century English estate or marrying a gloomy and boring clergyman. I love the characters and their psychological complexity. The novel has humour, heart, and the most beautiful last sentence ever written, which almost makes me cry each time. Yes, I do find different things in Middlemarch every time I read it, especially when I’m part of a reading group – the discoveries multiply! 

The book that changed the way I think about the world 

Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone. The main character in the novel is Richard, a widower and retired German academic living in Berlin who, instead of spending his now empty days reading Proust and Dostoyevsky, decides to interview African asylum seekers whose immigration status is stuck in bureaucratic limbo. The refugees he befriends have never even heard of Hitler, he discovers, and are unaware that there used to be a Berlin wall, a surprise to Richard and the reader. But the conversation made me reflect about media coverage and biases, and our lack of awareness of conflict and wars in Africa, from where the refugees were escaping. Richard doesn’t explain the truth about Hitler to the young man; he doesn’t want to add more burden to someone who has seen enough slaughter for a lifetime.