Earlier this month Juan Gabriel Vásquez became the first South American author to win the International IMPAC DUBLIN literary Award for his novel The Sound of Things Falling (translated by Anne McLean). We caught up with the Colombian author to find out how he felt about winning the prize, his literary inspirations and whether his award-winning novel, which explores what became of Colombia in the time of Pablo Escobar, is autobiographical.                                                                 Winning the IMPAC Literary Award I think it will make things easier but the thing with me personally, I know that I will go on writing exactly the same books in exactly the same way even if nothing came my way and even with no pats on the back. Awards don’t make your life easier as a novelist, you’re still alone facing the blank page not having one single clue about what to write, but they make life easier for the books themselves. They open roads for the books and of course they make me immensely proud and grateful to the people who give the award because they share the same idea as me, that novels are important and novelists should be supported. His Inspirations  There are two books that made me want to become a writer: one of them is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez and the other is James Joyce’s Ulysses. This I have been saying for a very long while so it’s not just a new thing! I think there are two kinds of influences: writers who influence your writing or your vocation, and writers who have an influence on your technique or style. These writers change from book to book but the others are ones who stay like ghosts overlooking your shoulder. In that group there’s Mario Vargas Llosa, Phillip Roth, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and this young guy called Shakespeare.  These are the people whose pictures I have and then there are the other ones who work book by book. For this book, a couple of novels were important for me: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, A Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford and La Vida Breve by Juan Carlos Onetti. The Sound of Things Falling  First came the character and his predicament, then came the shape. For a year and a half I wrote about this pilot but after 150 pages I began to feel that the story was too removed from my own experience. I wasn’t emotionally involved in it and I was being too safe. I can’t work that way. I need to be committed, to have something at stake. I was about to quit when I opened up a magazine and I found the picture of the hippo that had escaped from the old zoo and was hunted down by Colombian soldiers. That hippo made me, for the first time in over a decade, remember what it was like to grow up during those years: how I had never really understood what had happened to us as a generation, how being born at the same time as the drug trade, growing up in Columbia and becoming adults while Pablo Escobar’s war against the state was going on. All those memories started coming out and I realised that the narrator of the novel should be someone from my generation trying to make sense of that violence and this is how the novel was born. His Style I don’t work with themes. I’m interested in characters with their predicaments. That’s my first thing and then I write to find out what the themes are. It came as a big shock to me, halfway through the novel, to realise that I was writing about fear. I was writing about unpredictable violence, about what it does to you in your private life, to live in such a moment even if you’re not participating directly in what is going on. When you know what your themes are, the whole book starts gravitating towards those themes. I discover them as I write. Putting Himself Into His Novels  I think it’s unavoidable. In that way I think every novel is autobiographical. I can only write about things that worry me and in that sense, you end up throwing your own experience into the novel. I have been asked if The Sound of Things Falling is autobiographical and my answer is yes but it’s not because the things that happen to the character happened to me. It’s not because we share the same experiences, it’s because his experiences are my fears. This novel is filled with my fears and my deepest anxieties about what could have happened to me but didn’t, and that happened to people I know and to many people I don’t know. The Title  When I got to the part where there’s a plane crash, I began flirting with the idea of things that fall. I had already written that scene where a character listens to the recording of a black box so that was the first sound of things falling. As I wrote the book, that literal title was also turning metaphorical in that I was writing about a country which is falling and a family which is falling.