Interview by Misha HoncharenkoPortrait by Robin Silas Christian

MH Between your previous book, The Doloriad (2022) and The Vivisectors (2026), the atmosphere has shifted dramatically. The overt, disfigured violence that marked The Doloriad recedes in The Vivisectors. Instead, the tensions feel psychological, institutional, even linguistic. What drew you toward this recalibration of violence from the corporeal to the structural?

MW The Doloriad is primarily a family story. It’s concerned with the family as a claustrophobic unit and with the kinds of violence that occur within family spaces. It focuses on questions of power, how one individual can exert control over another within that intimate structure. The Vivisectors, by contrast, is much more social. In The Doloriad, the family functions as the central institution, whereas in The Vivisectors it is the university. It’s about the different structural forces that shape our lives. The Doloriad is a very inward-looking novel. It ends with the vision of a potential alternative – a moment of camaraderie between two sisters who each embody a different way of seeing and being. With The Vivisectors, I wanted to write something that engaged more directly with society to capture a complexity that we all recognise. At its centre, there’s a love story which parallels the movement of the book itself. It begins from a position of deep scepticism about others and gradually moves toward the idea that recognition is possible, that we can extend ourselves toward one another and have these moments of connection.

MH The Vivisectors resists being read as a conventional novel. I found myself abandoning the idea of linear narrative and approaching the book as a constellation of motifs, academic drama, family fractures and philosophical digressions, all orbiting one another. How conscious were you of constructing the book as an ecosystem, rather than a straightforward narrative arc?

MW I wanted to construct the book like a puzzle. It has a linear plot and progression, and a learning arc for the central character, but that arc is fragmented into smaller pieces that refract each other. I wanted the novel to have a prismatic structure, so the idea of a constellation works well as a description. There’s a range of different characters, and you also never really know whose perspective to trust, because they’re all unreliable in different ways. I needed a form that would constantly make the reader stop and question what they’re being told.

MH The novel explores academic precarity, career chaos, discrimination, institutional opacity and the breakdown of communication. What interests you about the university as a stage for our current cultural and political tensions?

MW The university is a powerful symbol for many people – either of the ascendancy of our times or their decline. It’s a flashpoint for arguments and debates, partly because it’s an enclosed space where everything is intensified. That intensifying of pre-existing tensions really interested me. At the same time, the university is also a familiar space for me. I spent much of my twenties involved in different programmes, and I value the university as an institution. I’m interested in what the university means to us now, especially at a time when it’s under such strong pressure from market forces. I was among the last cohorts in England to attend university before the tripling of tuition fees. Once the university has to appeal to consumers, this inevitably changes our expectations of what an education should provide. The Vivisectors was an attempt to think through those questions, without arriving at a clear or definitive position.

MH The novel moves between satire, suspense and philosophical inquiry. How do you negotiate tonal risk when writing certain passages, such as the mold song or the gardeners’ chorus that verge on the surreal or operatic?

MW There’s something true in those sections that I can’t reach through more conventional prose or narrative. The Vivisectors would feel incomplete without the gardeners’ chorus or the “mold’s song”. They’re there to say something about the nature of the situation that feels purer than what could be expressed through the perspective of a single character, or stated more dryly by a narrative voice. Casting around for different styles and voices allows me to attempt things I wouldn’t otherwise do. In the case of the gardeners, the chorus becomes a digression on duty, transcendence and the nature of cities, and it also creates a clash of narrative voices and opinions. I’m interested in choruses as a structure because they allow you to expand the main narrative more fantastically. It’s really talking about the experience of isolation and exclusion within institutional spaces. I felt that approaching it indirectly worked better than stating it outright. Framing it through something as absurd as a singing piece of mold almost forces me, as a reader, to take the statements more seriously.

MH Both The Doloriad and The Vivisectors feel like meditations on dark times, but this new novel also seems deeply concerned with what literature itself can or cannot do now. In an era shaped by environmental crisis, institutional distrust and information overload, what do you feel the novel is uniquely capable of?

MW Each reader holds different expectations of what a modern work of fiction should do. There’s a question of whether books should have a clear moral framework or whether they should be challenging or provocative. Personally, I think the only real duty of fiction is to present the reader with a scenario that absorbs them and gives them space to form their own opinions about what they’re encountering. I shy away from fiction where everything is clearly signposted, and it’s obvious what you’re meant to think. I am interested in books that disturb you in some way. When I say a novel should be provocative, I don’t mean provocative as aggressive, shocking or ugly. I mean it in the sense that it asks something of you as a reader. It invites a response you might not otherwise have had, and ideally, it shows you something new. .