Humphrey Hawksley
Humphrey Hawksley is an award-winning author and foreign correspondent whose assignments with the BBC have taken him to crises all over the world. His Rake Ozenna series originated when reporting from the US-Russian border during heightened tension. He has been guest lecturer at universities and think tanks such as the RAND Corporation, The Center for Strategic and International Studies and MENSA Cambridge. He moderates the monthly Democracy Forum debates on international issues and is a host on the weekly Goldster Book Club where he discusses books and talks to authors. He has presented numerous BBC documentaries and his latest non-fiction work is Asian Waters: The Struggle Over the Indo-Pacific and the Challenge to American Power.
Marina Raydun: Your CV is truly impressive-a journalist working as international correspondent for BBC since the early 1980s, your professional and life experience is fairly unique. Would you be able to pinpoint an event from your professional life that may have inspired you to start writing fiction?
Humphrey Hawksley: Early teenage reading planted the seeds. I devoured Leon Uris’ fictional history Exodus on the founding of Israel; then Author Hailey’s Airport, Hotel and others; Robert Ruark on Africa and James Mitchener with The Drifters, Hawaii and so on. These books gave me a scope of the world that the classroom barely covered. I couldn’t get enough of these books. Then, years later, in 1995, when I was the BBC Beijing Bureau Chief, I drafted an outline for a non-fiction book about China. My agent, David Grossman, arranged a meeting with the legendary publisher, the late William Armstrong of Macmillan. He glanced through the outline, slid it to one side and leant forward, chin resting on his hands, and said, “This is all very worthy. But could you write me a fictional story of China and America going to war?” I was so happy. That book was Dragon Strike, published in 1997, and, given the current turn of events, it is still selling well today.
MR: What is the first experience you had when you learned that language had power?
HH: What and excellent question! Singing hymns at primary school morning assembly. Onward Christian soldiers. The head teachers saying -- Let us pray and a hall full of children lower their heads and clasp their hands. Then came William Shakespeare and Graham Greene.
MR: Talk to us a little about your Rake Ozenna series. What inspired you to pursue such a storyline? It’s hard to fathom how much research must go into each volume in the series!
HH: Rake Ozenna emerged from a BBC assignment in 2015 when I visited the island of Little Diomede. Far away in Europe, Russia had just taken Crimea and was threatening Ukraine. I wanted to go to the place where the American and Russian territories actually met. Little Diomede is amazing as are the eighty or so people who live there. They wake up every morning looking across a narrow stretch of water at a Russian military island barely two miles away. The islanders are independent, as tough as leather and hard as steel and they live in a wild, remote environment that few people know about. That led to Man on Ice the first in the series. Rake is an islander who is with the Alaska National Guard and a veteran of foreign wars. It would have been easier to create a hero from my own backyard. But I couldn’t resist choosing the unusual setting of Little Diomede and the opportunity to create a no-nonsense hard-as-nails character like Rake Ozenna. As the great Nelson DeMille so kindly said, “We’re glad he’s on our side.”
MR: What does literary success look like to you?
HH: Is it possible? Maybe if you’re like Harper Lee, J. D. Salinger or Jack Kerouac and you do a really great book that stays in the public conversation. But when you’re doing a book every year or so, you’re only as good as your next book. I have met writers whom I regard as hugely successful and often find them concentrating on their failures and anxious to do better.
MR: You also have non-fiction titles to your name. How does your writing process vary depending on whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction?
HH: Fiction is more difficult. I need uninterrupted ‘me’ time to work out characters, structure, pace and so on. Making stuff up isn’t as easy as it sounds. The non-fiction is more straight forward, and I can work from research and reporting even with people around and interruptions. It is, though, very different to journalism. Structuring 1,000 words is not the same and structuring 100,000.
MR: What’s the best and worst book review you’ve ever received?
HH: I do like the Kirkus one for Man on Fire -- Brass-knuckled international intrigue for readers who still pine for the world of James Bond. I love the one star Amazon for last year’s non-fiction Asian Waters: The Struggle Over the Indo-Pacific and the Challenge to American Power. “Good for tabloid style opinion reading, not an academic work.”
MR: What is your favorite genre to read?
HH: A political thriller and its non-fiction counterpart.
MR: If you could have drinks with any person, living or dead, who would it be? Why?
HH: Adolf Hitler. The bad guy makes the story and he’s the baddest of the bad. Look at all the material still coming out of Nazism and the Second World War.
MR: What do you think about when you’re alone in your car?
HH: Should I get a new GPS. And I structure chapters and plan travel.
MR: Is there a book that people might be surprised to learn you love?
HH: Candide by Voltaire – the horrors and folly the world throws at us; the Panglossian optimism that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds; and the secret of happiness is to cultivate one’s own garden.
To learn more about Humphrey Hawksley visit the following:
https://www.linkedin.com/me/profile-views/urn:li:wvmp:summary/
https://www.facebook.com/HumphreyHawksleyThrillers