Winner of the Orange First Novel prize for Inglorious, Joanna Kavenna's other works include The Ice Museum. Her journalism has appeared in the London Review of Books, the Guardian, and the New York Times.

Here she tells Vassili Christodoulou about the problem of differentiating between reality and unreality in works of fiction, and how high irony can save writers and readers from the tyranny of reality.

In your talk on IAI TV, you describe the novel as “a field guide to reality”. You give a very clear definition of a field guide, but what do you mean by reality?

Well precisely! What a crucial fundamental question. In a way, my enterprise, my entire point in the conversation you’re referring to, is to question the confident use of terms like realistic and unrealistic and the value-laden ways that they are used – positively in the way of realistic and pejoratively in the way of unrealistic: i.e. the characters were realistic versus the characters were unrealistic.

And my point was that this entire debate is premised on the wonderfully un-interrogated assumption that anyone knows what the hell reality is anyway. Because if you’re making a reference to a reality, and you’re saying that others are either in line with this reference or not, then there’s a suggestion that someone knows what that reality is. So the crucial question is: Who is defining reality, and on what basis? If you use these terms in an un-interrogated way, you’re capitulating before the contest. You’re accepting something that you have neither fathomed nor questioned, and neither have the people who promulgate it.