When courage inspires a novelist | Victoria Hislop | TEDxThessaloniki

For novelist Victoria Hislop, "courage" lies in the lives of everyday people, whose stories act as the source of inspiration for her novels. Her stories, set on the island of Crete or in Granada, are connected by the common thread of courage, as exemplified by her heroes. In this talk, Hislop unfolds the inspirational stories of courage behind her novels.

Victoria Hislop read English at Oxford and worked in publishing, PR and as a journalist on several national newspapers and magazines before becoming a novelist. Her first novel, "The Island," held the number one slot in the Sunday Times paperback chart for eight consecutive weeks and has sold over two million copies worldwide. Victoria was the Newcomer of the Year at the Galaxy British Book Awards 2007, and her second novel, "The Return," was also a number one bestseller. "The Thread," which was published in the autumn of 2011, spent nine weeks in the Sunday Times hardback chart and was widely acclaimed. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages. Victoria also writes short stories and her first collection, "One Cretan Evening," is available as an ebook. She is married with two children.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

When I was invited to speak here
today, in Thessaloniki,

about the courage to create,

I thought immediately of all the writers

in the in the past decades,
and even centuries,

who've actually been persecuted
for their writing.

Those writers really needed courage.

Like most British writers,

I belong to an organization
called PEN International,

and PEN International
campaigns very vigorously

for all the writers who are currently
imprisoned or persecuted around the world.

Every year it publishes
a list of those people

and runs campaigns
for specific individuals,

and with great success sometimes.

The most recent list

had approximately a thousand names,

so I kind of felt, in some ways,
I had to mention those writers

because they are
the really courageous people,

who are prepared to go to prison
for what they put down on paper.

At the moment,

there's a very high-profile
Chinese writer called Liu Xiaobo,

who is a Nobel Peace Prize winner,

and he's currently
still in prison in China.

And perhaps a more famous recent example

of somebody who's not in prison
but who was persecuted in Turkey

was Orhan Pamuk,

and in Britain, he's a very much,
very highly-thought-of author,

and his crime, as probably you all know,
he was insulting Turkishness

for writing about the Kurds
and the Armenians.

But in the 20th century, in Greece,

there are many examples of writers
who showed enormous courage.

Again, I haven't read some of these,
because they haven't been translated,

so forgive me for not having read
extensively their works.

Maybe somebody, after this talk,

can come up and translate
a few of their poems for me.

Of course, there was Yiannis Ritsos,

who spent much of his life exiled

on those islands of exile,

and had his works burnt,

and was persecuted for many years.

And then, apparently,
a man called Titos Patrikios.

I am told he had to bury some of his poems

to protect them from the authorities.

In Britain, we have pretty much
complete freedom of speech,

and it's something
that always needs protecting;

it's not something
we should take for granted.

And I happened to notice
on the PEN website

that there are these local branches of PEN
all around the world,

and I couldn't find one
that was actually based here, in Greece.

So that's maybe a challenge
to the audience here,

that there really should be one
set up in this country

to help writers in other countries.

So, for me, courage -

I only really need it
when the book reviews come out.

You know, it's not
a big factor in my own life,

and, of course, critics
have complete freedom of speech,

and that's the only time

when I really feel terrified
about being a writer -

apart from standing
on this red circle, which is, frankly -

no one's yet mentioned it, I don't think -

it does require a little bit of courage,

maybe more than I've ever needed.

But I write about courage;
I write about other people's courage.

It is the one single thing
that really inspires me,

the courage of ordinary people.

Spinalonga.

This is a picture of an island

that I think some of you
will be familiar with

from having watched the television series
(Greek) "The Island".

When I first went there, as a tourist,

I knew absolutely nothing about the place.

I knew nothing about leprosy -

which was the reason
people were sent to Spinalonga -

apart from the fact there was
a huge stigma surrounding it.

And what I discovered,
when I even went on that first visit,

was that the people there,
apparently, from what I could see,

had lived relatively very normal lives.

These were people who were,
as you can see from this picture,

living within - they could see
their families, maybe their relatives,

living on the mainland opposite,

and yet many of them
went there for decades,

and they showed huge courage
in surviving the life that they had there.

The clues that sort of told me
how courageous they'd been

and really how long suffering they'd been

were little things actually within
the infrastructure of the island itself.

There were tiny pieces of curtain
fluttering still from the window frames

and patches of wall still painted
in this lovely bright blue

and pots of geraniums that had been there
probably for a couple of decades,

and there was (Greek) a coffee shop,

a church and shops,

and all these things that showed
what normal lives that they'd lived.

The stigma of leprosy is a strange one.

It actually goes back to biblical days,
when people were told -

there's a whole chapter
in the Old Testament -

people were told that leprosy
was a punishment from God,

either a sin that you had committed

or even a sin, perhaps,
that one of your ancestors had committed.

So it was based
on a complete fallacy, in effect.

And, of course, leprosy
tends to deform people.

That's what happens in the end

after many years of having the disease.

And we fear what is different,
and we fear what is ugly.

In the television serial,

we portrayed actually many different ways
in which leprosy affects the body.

Sometimes it's facial deformities

with lesions on the skin,

and other times, the nerve-endings,

which are destroyed
by the leprosy bacteria,

lead to the loss of fingers,
toes, arms, legs.

And it's actually a bacterial disease;

it's not, obviously, a curse from God.

The cure was actually found in the 1950s,

the bacteria having been identified
about 50 years earlier,

and at that time,
the stigma should have gone.

Everybody should have realised
this isn't a curse from God;

it is just a disease
like any other disease,

an illness like tuberculosis,
that any one of us could catch,

whether we were a priest,

a child, a king, a man in the street -

at every level of society
it's possible to contract this disease.

The people on Spinalonga

showed great courage

because when they came away
from that island,

many of them bore
the marks of that disease

and were still treated
and shunned by society.

When (Greek) "The Island,"
"Το Νησί" was translated,

I had the huge privilege of meeting
a man called Manolis Fountoulakis,

who was probably
the most courageous person

I've ever met.

You'll see from the picture that Manolis
suffered from leprosy himself,

and he shows many
of the characteristic deformities

from the disease.

And yet, he was the wisest,
funniest, kindest man I've ever met.

He never complained about anything at all,

and we became very good friends

for the period of his life.

He, sadly, died two years ago,

almost to the day.

But he was probably the man who inspired
very much the television series.

As you can see, he played as an extra,

and that was an extraordinary
moment in my own life,

of standing, playing next to him myself,

kind of being made up to have leprosy

but standing with Manoli, who really
had suffered from the disease.

And he demonstrated

that leprosy changes the body,

but very much not the mind
or the personality.

He inspired everybody
who worked on (Greek) "The Island".

Most people spent hours every day

up at his house,
having a raki that he made.

I don't know if you can see,
probably quite clearly, actually,

he had very distended hands,
very big hands,

which is something that can happen

when the leprosy bacteria
attack the nerve-endings.

But with these huge, giant hands of his,

he used to make, somehow -
I never actually saw him doing it -

but this magnificent cherry raki

that was his kind of specialty.

So I sometimes think
that half the actors and the crew

were a little bit inebriated,
having gone up to see Manoli.

But he was a truly courageous
and inspirational man.

After writing "The Island",

I sort of stumbled
across the story of civil war

and wrote a novel set in Spain,

and there, again, this was the courage
of ordinary people in the street

that inspired me to write that story.

Probably everyone here knows
about their own civil war,

but the Spanish Civil War

actually has a lot
of similar characteristics to it

as the Greek Civil War,

except that the Spanish Civil War
was quite short and sharp,

three years,

during which ordinary people -

teenagers, women, everyone
who basically was anti-fascist -

took up a weapon and fought
against a trained army.

Sadly, the Republic,
i.e. the legally elected republic,

people who fought for that lost.

And until 1975 - so for nearly 40 years -

people who had fought against Franco,

the army general
who had conducted the coup,

were persecuted, imprisoned,
sent into exile.

Lots of children ended up
away from their parents,

all around the world,

trying to escape from the evils
of that fascist regime.

But it was an inspirational story for me,

again, reading about
these ordinary people,

and then writing about
what they tried to achieve.

And then, more latterly, Thessaloniki.

And my latest story

is so much a story of the courage
of the people of this city

that my English readers

think that I've made up
a lot of the catastrophes

that took place here.

They say, "Well, you know,
how much of this is real?

Could there really have been a fire,

an influx of a huge number of refugees
and departure of a huge number of Muslims,

occupation, civil war,

the loss of a third of the population
of 60,000 Jewish people here,

and then many other things?"

And my book actually ends
with the earthquake of 1978.

Readers at home almost find this
impossible to believe,

that anyone could have actually survived.

Because some people
did see each of those events

and live to tell the story.

Once I discovered

that there was this sequence
of catastrophes

that happened in Thessaloniki,

I was sitting in a café one day,

out there, in the sunshine,

and I saw an elderly couple.

They were probably about 85, 90,

and they were smaller than me,

smaller than the average Greek,

definitely smaller than
the average Greek teenager,

but very strong looking.

And in a slightly strange way.

Maybe they're sitting out here, somewhere,

those people.

They don't know who they are,
but I followed them home.

They lived in a (Greek)
block of flats like this,

and I watched them struggling home
with their shopping,

and they were tough, and they were strong,

and they became,
in my imagination, my heroes.

One of them, Katerina,
is a refugee from Asia Minor,

and the elderly man, in my mad
novelist imagination, Dimitris,

is the man she eventually marries.

And these people, in my head,

lived through those extraordinary
events of the 20th century

that required,

from an outsider's point of view,

absolutely superhuman courage.

And again, maybe this is an image
everybody here has seen.

It's an iconic picture of Papaioannou

that she took during the occupation,

showing a starving child.

When I think of what
the Greek people lived through

during the war,

again, it's unbelievable
for British people.

We think we suffered
during the Second World War,

but we weren't occupied,

we always had food,

we always had shoes.

We lost a lot of people
during that conflict,

but we didn't live through the pain
and the conflict and the suffering

that the Greek people did.

And what I do try to communicate
to people in the UK:

I'm lucky at the moment
to have this opportunity,

with this book that I have written,

to go around the country
and do lots of talks about it,

and I always end up really talking
about the current situation

and explaining how there is a link

between these things
that have happened in Greece

up to the present day,

that the current things
you're going through

didn't just begin 10 years ago.

And 90 years ago, 60 years ago,

30 years ago, 10 years ago,

there have been
these points in Greek history

where I think you have to have
a lot of courage.

I'm very passionate about Greece,

but I have this, in some ways,
great fortune, that I can come and go,

and I know here you have to stay

and not fight exactly, but be strong
for what's happening.

My message, if I have one at all,

is that you need to continue
to have that courage.

You have a huge number of friends outside

who are now beginning to see

that your situation
is part of a bigger situation.

I didn't intend to talk
about British politics at all,

but probably not in your newspapers,

because I know you're probably
completely fixated on your own situation,

but a week ago, in England,

we had local elections
all around the country,

and there was huge movement
away from the Right to the Left.

We still have Cameron,
because they weren't general elections,

but it really rocked our country,

that there is this shift

away from Conservatism towards the Left,

and the same, obviously,
happened in France.

And there's a general shift,

and I think the whole of Europe

needs courage to face
what's going to happen

in the next year or so.

So, from me,

I know in English, funnily enough,
we use a French phrase -

very odd -

we have a strange relationship
with the French,

but occasionally we break into French,

like "Bon voyage", we'll say.

We never say "Have a good journey",
we say "Bon voyage",

and we say "Bon courage".

We say, I think to translate,
it would be "Καλή δύναμη",

and I think everyone here maybe
needs courage in the next few months

more than I do.

But (Greek) "stay strong"
for all my Greek friends here.

(Applause)

Thank you.