Claire Kohda: 'I think good fiction always has something true about it, no matter the genre and setting'
BY Discoveries
30th Oct 2024
CBC and Curtis Brown are proud to be partnering with the Women’s Prize Trust and Audible to run Discoveries for a fifth year. This unique writing development prize and programme offers practical support and encouragement to aspiring female novelists of all ages and backgrounds, from across the UK and Ireland. The prize accepts novels in any genre of adult fiction, with entrants invited to submit the first 10,000 words of their novel and a synopsis.
We spoke to Claire Kohda about her writing process, reading recommendations, and what she’ll be looking for as a judge for Discoveries 2025.
Your debut novel Woman, Eating follows Lydia – a young and hungry mixed-race woman in London – living apart from her vampire mother for the first time. She is starved of food (that she cannot eat), blood and human connection. You’ve mentioned before that the word vampire has a lot of pre-existing connotations attached to it – what inspired you to tackle this mythos and put your own unique spin on the vampire genre? Did you always know that Lydia was going to be a vampire?
I actually haven’t read vampire fiction, or much horror, so I didn’t come to the novel with a plan to reinvent anything. But I was, at the time, reviewing a lot of literature in translation as a book critic. I was reading a lot of fiction from East Asian countries, in which the supernatural often finds its way into literature without defining it. I was finding that a novel could include a ghost (for e.g. Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri, and Where The Wild Ladies Are by Matsuda Aoko, Human Acts by Han Kang), or even a vampire (for e.g. Life For Sale by Mishima Yukio) and not be horror. In my mum’s home country, Japan, the supernatural always exists close to real life due to the presence of Yōkai, Shinto gods and animism in Japanese culture. Japanese story-telling has often also processed trauma through the supernatural – for instance, Godzilla was created in response to the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So, for me it felt natural to have a supernatural creature in a grounded and non-horror story. It felt somehow a part of my literary heritage.
I was drawn specifically to the vampire due to the fact that what makes it different is its diet – a vampire consumes blood – and I had grown up experiencing racist attacks about food (my cuisine mocked, or being called a dog-eater, or whale-eater). A vampire is also inherently a mix of different things; it is a demon existing in the body of a human, and it retains its human memories. I found that fascinating. Through Lydia, I explored difference, otherness, food, foreignness, and the feelings of division and conflict that can arise from being mixed race.
I knew she was a vampire immediately when I started writing. She just walked into my mind one day, and I simply followed her through the story, never knowing what she was going to do or say, but knowing that I should trust her as a character and let her lead me.
The first-person narrative voice in your debut allows the reader to connect with Lydia’s alienation and hunger. Do you have any advice for budding writers on how to craft a protagonist’s inner voice?
I don’t really feel like I crafted her voice. Writing, when it’s going well, is quite meditative for me. I try to get to a place where I can just watch my characters, follow them, listen to them. The less I’m trying to make my characters be something I want them to be, the better. They become their own people. My advice to writers who might work this way too is to trust themselves, their characters and stories.
You also write short fiction and essays. Is there one form you prefer over the others?
No – I feel like what I want to do is often irrelevant when it comes to writing; it’s all about what the story wants and needs. Sometimes a story comes to me and just demands to be a short story, other times a novel; or a topic or idea will be best explored in an essay. I think I love all the forms equally because they are containers for different ideas, thoughts, scenes or characters.
Who is your favourite fictional character?
I’m going to cheat and give two answers, and I feel like maybe I’m allowed to cheat here because the second one might not quite be real.
I love Cécile in Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan. She’s seventeen, and dramatic, frivolous, funny, learning about what love is and what it isn’t. She is one of those interesting characters that is on the cusp of something, in between two things, or two states of being or ways of existing – in the case of Cécile, she is between childhood and adulthood, girlhood and womanhood. She’s sometimes naïve, ridiculous and silly; but she’s also wise in ways she doesn’t realise. We always think of people growing wiser the older they get, but there’s a wisdom to children and young people too, because they let themselves feel everything; they allow themselves to think of things adults tend to push away or see as taboo – death, mortality, beauty, time, goodness, badness. Cécile is at the beginning of her life, and it’s like she’s designing herself, thinking, Who will I be? Will I be a good person, or a bad person?
I also love Richard Parker, the tiger in Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Is the tiger real? Does he represent faith? Is he a kind of shadow-self? I don’t know. But either way he’s there, trapped in the boat with the human protagonist Pi; and he’s threatening, a constant worry, a reminder of Pi’s mortality, of danger, also a companion, a friend, but totally foreign to Pi. They share no language, no commonality, but they’re in the same boat, drifting across the sea together. There’s something so absurd about him as a character; but also he just makes total sense.
Which books do you always recommend to others?
Ore Agbaje-Williams’ The Three of Us. Set over just one day, this novel reads almost like a play, the drama is so taut, so beautifully and elegantly constructed. It is a masterclass in writing marriage and friendship – it is incredibly tense, while domestic in its setting and subject, and is also just really funny. I’ve not yet known anyone who hasn’t loved it.
Then, also, The Ice Palace, by Tarjei Vesaas. It’s a cliché to say that a setting in a book is also a character. But in this novel, set in the Norwegian fjords, the ice really seems to speak, and it seems to witness the events unfold, too; the wind, the trees, shadows, everything is alive. Vesaas’s writing also is so incredibly beautiful; it has a sort of luminosity and texture – that’s the only way I can think to describe it. Then there’s Siss, the eleven-year-old main character, who will follow you around and stay with you even when you’re not reading. I can’t think of many books better than this one.
And Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness. A book can be easy to sum up in one line, or it can encompass so much that it is impossible to explain, and you just have to say read it. The only way to describe this book is perhaps to say it is about everything, and about how everything connects to everything. It’s complex, rich, so warm, expansive, funny, deeply sad.
And Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station. This is a slim novel that is framed by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and also looks at inequality, homelessness, suicide and racism in Japan, all through the perspective of a ghost. I love books that use fantasy or horror elements without actually being horror or fantasy books, and this is exactly that; somehow, despite its ghostly protagonist, it is grounded, and feels so real and alive.
Lastly, I like reading poetry for how the form makes writers play with words in a way that is so different to fiction, and I often send poetry in messages to friends who are also writers. Will Harris’s poetry for how in just a few stanzas, he can carry us far back into memory and history while also exploring the plasticity and uncertainty of those two things. And Ocean Vuong’s poetry for, amongst much else, how he turns words and phrases around, making us see them in new light – Vuong’s poetry often shocks me in its beauty.
We’re delighted to have you onboard as a judge for Discoveries 2025 – do you have any advice for writers getting ready to submit to the prize?
It’s really easy to talk ourselves out of doing things – to say "I’m not good enough", or, "I don’t belong", or "I’m from the wrong background". Make a rule for yourself to not listen to those voices right now, and just listen to the voice that is telling you to enter, no matter how small that voice is. Don’t focus on the bad things; instead think, "if I enter, what’s the best thing that could happen?"
What will you be looking for from entrants when reading for Discoveries?
I think good fiction always has something true about it, no matter the genre and setting – even if it’s set on a different planet or has a non-human protagonist, or is full of magic. I want something that rings true – a true feeling, emotion, meaning – that reflects back something of our world and experiences as humans.
Claire Kohda is part of the Discoveries 2025 judging panel – she will be joined by chair of judges and founder of the Women's Prize Kate Mosse, acclaimed authors Dreda Say Mitchell and Chloe Timms, Curtis Brown literary agent Jess Molloy and CBC’s founder Anna Davis.
Best of luck preparing your submission to Discoveries 2025. We’re so excited to read your work!
Get your hands on a copy of Woman, Eating.
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