Readers and Writers: Childbirth boosted writer's confidence

Monica Ali credits her inspiration to a lifetime of human observation following a childhood move from Bangladesh to England.

It wasn't until Monica Ali had her first child she felt confident enough to attempt a novel.

"I thought if I could be creative in one way, perhaps I could be creative in another," the popular British author revealed during a relaxed talk with Paula Morris yesterday.

The death of her grandfather, a reminder of life's fragility, also spurred her to start Brick Lane, her Booker Prize-winning novel set in melting pot London - as did a lifetime of human observation following a childhood move from Bangladesh to England.

After reading an excerpt from her new novel, In the Kitchen, Ali was self-assured and chatty as she dissected the themes of cultural displacement in her work, particularly the ethnically diverse characters who make up what she calls London's "new working class".

She spent a year researching the new book in the north of England, where she interviewed older people about the social changes they've witnessed. She also chopped vegetables in a busy London kitchen with a virtual "UN assembly" of staff, whose fractured lives made the telling of their stories equally fractured.

Ali's prose aside, it was clear she was born to be a writer.

So, too, was Judith Thurman. A young boy once asked her, "How did you get to be the thing you are?"

It's a question she has since asked many others, as an esteemed biographer of Isak Dinesen and Collette, and as a staff writer at the New Yorker. During her rich and enlightening Michael King Memorial Lecture, Thurman revealed her surprise at turning out to be the thing she is after her early years as a poet, and later an advertising copy writer and one-time author of dubbed-over German porn. (Her friend was hired to do the moaning).

As lively and challenging in person as she is in her work, Thurman described her process as dealing with a "Lego universe", putting together pieces of the puzzle without assembly instructions, trusting her instincts about the turning points in the subject's life or, as she put it, waiting until "the truth washes down into your pan".

Her talent for doing so was apparent as she skipped between insights of her quiet mother and the disparate writers whose lives she has immortalised.

It was a comfort to the writers in the room that the essence of her pieces is not always clear until she puts pen to page, and especially interesting to hear her "terrible" (though poetically lovely) introductions to a feature on tofu and how they compared to the final.

Pakistani novelist Mohammed Hanif, who told media he was made to feel like a terrorist when he was detained at Auckland Airport for two hours, showed no signs his introduction to New Zealand would taint his stay here during a relaxed session with Ali Ikram.

The 2009 Commonwealth Prize winner for Best First Book read generous excerpts from A Case of Exploding Mangoes, his fictionalised account of the mysterious air crash that killed Pakistan's military dictator General Zia ul-Haq in 1988. He joked it was "sheer laziness" that led him to base his book on truth and downplayed many of the book's tricks as mere plot devices.

Although a scene in which the general misses important news while he rides his bicycle at night - a slight bending of the truth - was his "real writer kind of moment".

Despite Hanif's claim he was never a big reader, his background as a journalist and former head of the BBC's Urdu Service - he is now the BBC's special reporter in Pakistan - have clearly provided him with the tools to paint a worldly, accurate picture of his central character, a man he was surprised to find had a good reputation outside of Pakistan.

He was just as modest about the book's vivid details, saying he only managed to draw on the textures of his life in the Air Force, the tedious few years when he became "the worst pilot who ever took off".

He might not be a first-class flyer, but after such an ungracious start to the trip, we wish him a first-class flight home.