War, ghosts and poetry: Inside the intense mind of Canadian novelist Anne Michaels

Her bestselling Holocaust novel ‘Fugitive Pieces’ was made into a film and stayed on the most-read lists for two years, but poet and writer Anne Michaels has been keeping fans waiting between books. She gives a rare interview to Claire Allfree to talk about her new novel ‘Held’ and why she is so drawn to war as subject

‘War is fought in our most intimate places. A hospital is bombed. A nursery is bombed. The places we feel most sheltered are taken from us in war’ (Derek Shapton)

The first thing Anne Michaels wishes to know is whether my two children have recovered from a vomiting bug that wiped out our weekend. It’s a charming surprise – I had expected the 65-year-old author of the global bestseller Fugitive Pieces to be rather remote, as befits her somewhat austere reputation as a writer who rarely reveals much about her private life. But no, she is delightfully solicitous and, on Zoom, looking radiant, the light behind her desk giving her hair an incandescent glow. I do know she has two children, now grown up, herself, and suggest it must be a relief to her to no longer have to worry about vomiting bugs in babies. “Yes,” she says in her measured Canadian drawl, punctuated throughout our conversation with bursts of warm easy laughter. “But of course, the attention never wavers.”

That philosophy seems to get to the core of Michaels not just as a mother but a writer. An award-winning poet and novelist born and based in Toronto, she is known most for 1997’s Fugitive Pieces – the story of a child rescued from the horrors of the Holocaust who later finds a salvation of sorts as a poet – which won the Orange Prize for Fiction and was later made into a film starring Rosamund Pike and Stephen Dillane. It’s a tremendous piece of work, combining intellectual rigour with poetic delicacy, and, perhaps surprisingly for such an unrepentantly literary book, became an enormous hit. The novel remained on the Canadian bestseller lists for two years and was taken to heart by readers across the world, in ways only a few novels manage to do. “I got sent so many emails and letters about that book, and I answered every single one,” she says with a smile. “The idea of talking mind to mind, heart to heart with readers means everything to me.”

She followed it a whole decade later (Michaels is no Jeffrey Archer) with The Winter Vault, about a couple whose lives are dramatically affected by the building of the Aswan dam in Egypt in 1964. And now, a decade on once again, comes her new novel, Held. Like all her work, it is deeply immersed in the question of how to memorialise the past and in acts of public and private remembrance; the book darts like a swallow between the lives of various people at historically charged moments, mainly in the 20th century. What took her so long? “I’ve been writing poetry as well,” she says (she also writes for the stage, and teaches at the University of Toronto). “But this novel has been pretty all-consuming. It’s saturated with research – philosophy, science, history in particular. I didn’t want the history to be overt though – I wanted it to be glinting under the surface. So much labour has been spent to make something that I hope is alive on the page to another human being.”