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.