KEY POINTS:
Until now, Peter Ho Davies had never visited New Zealand, so it's interesting the Coventry-born author's inaugural short story collection The Ugliest House in the World has been compared to one of our most iconic authors, Katherine Mansfield.
"It's terrifically flattering," says Ho Davies, 41, in town this week for the Auckland Writers & Readers' Festival. He's usually based in Detroit where he teaches Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.
"Katherine Mansfield is somebody I teach to my students a great deal. She is a permanent part of my short story class. It's interesting to see how the students respond.
"Many of them don't seem to know Mansfield's work until I teach it to them, but when they read it, they have a really strong reaction to it. I'm excited about that but I feel that it ought not to be me that introduces them to Mansfield for the first time. Still, I'm glad that they're belatedly getting that exposure and a number of them have gone on to read her quite closely."
Ho Davies' debut novel of last year, The Welsh Girl, centres around the intersecting lives of a German Jewish British intelligence agent, a German POW and the titular 17-year-old farmer's daughter whose paths cross in Snowdonia at the close of World War II.
While its historical naturalism is similar to Mansfield, it is light years from some of Ho Davies other formative influences.
"I was a big fan of science fiction when I was young," he admits. "I always feel that I'm not the best-read writer in the world or the most classically trained. From when I was in my early teens, I read nothing but science fiction, often quite bad science fiction, like novelisations of television programmes and films. The genre boasts a number of wonderful writers but I wasn't very discerning about it."
A book about the genre, Who Writes Science Fiction? which comprised interviews with writers such as Philip K. Dick, Brian Aldiss and Michael Moorcock, provided Ho Davies with his crucial epiphany.
"It led me to a lot of writers that I had not yet read, such as Kurt Vonnegut," he recalls.
The book made Ho Davies realise that somebody from his background could aspire to be an author.
"When I was growing up in Britain, the most famous writer of my day was Martin Amis," he says. "Coming from where I did in the Midlands, everything seemed very stratified. I admire Martin Amis as a writer but certainly back then it seemed that he became a writer because his father was a writer.
"I thought it was as likely that I would become a writer as I would become the king. A lot of my family had a science background, my father was an engineer and I did a physics degree at university. I could imagine becoming someone like my dad, someone who worked in a lab. But a lot of those science fiction writers were also engineers and scientists so it then became imaginable that I could become a writer."
Ho Davies is looking forward to meeting his fellow festival guest Junot Diaz in Auckland. Diaz - whose debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao scooped the Pulitzer Prize - resists being referred to as "the new voice of Dominican fiction".
It's an experience that Ho Davies, whose mother is Chinese and father Welsh, can relate to, especially after he moved to the United States, where his British accent and Asian features attracted attention.
"Over here, there's a lot of talk of Asian-American writers," he says. "It's flattering company to be included in and there are many Asian-American writers that I admire enormously. I can understand why people would use the term when talking about the writing coming out of, say, the Chinese-American or Korean-American communities but it also seems to blur the distinctions between them.
"The different Asian-American communities have things in common but there are other things about them that are very distinctive."
Ho Davies' second novel will represent a departure from The Welsh Girl's realist period drama.
"It's still at the notional stage but let's just say that it's going to be significantly different," he teases. "I've always liked that, it probably comes from my varied life history and family connections."
- Detours, HoS
