Anna Burns, 2018 Booker Prize (post 2): Author says interview is only of host personality, but alternate personalities would have given "a great interview"

“Burns belongs to the school of novelists for whom characters just ‘come and tell me their stories, in their voices’. She is not very comfortable talking about her writing. Now that the book is finished and the characters have gone, she says: ‘You just get me. I’m sure they’d give you a great interview, but you’ve got me.’

“Like all her characters, the milkman just ‘came to her’, she says, ‘he just drove up in his car’. She never writes to make a point or explore an issue. ‘So I write it and then I see – oh yes, this is sexual abuse, this is sexual scandal, this is a book about rumours, gossip, the power of gossip, the power of history and also the power of fabricated history, when rumours become the history.’ ” (1).

1. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/17/anna-burns-booker-prize-winner-life-changing-interview