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The Walrus Lab Hire The Walrus Lab Amazon First Novel Award

Amazon First Novel Award

Maria Reva, winner of this year’s Amazon Canada First Novel Award, on the creative collision of reality and fiction

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You started writing Endling, which is set in Ukraine, before the Russian invasion in 2022. How was that disruption reflected in your writing process and, ultimately, the book?

I had one established premise—the bachelors being kidnapped in the van—when Russia launched its full-scale invasion. At that point, I truly did not know what to do with the book. For a time, I gave up on it. I just kept obsessing over the question of fiction’s role in today’s rapidly changing world. Can it contain our reality, or does it need to break out of its container in some form? I knew my book had to break out because I couldn’t just go back to writing it business-as-usual—as if the war wasn’t destroying its setting in real time. I let go of the idea of a neatly plotted book, and I let it be derailed by reality, the way my relatives’ lives were completely derailed by the war.

I’m curious about how much of what happened to your family was fused into your characters’ experiences.

Some of it definitely fed into the book—when the characters go into Kherson as the troops are rolling in, the kind of terror of watching machinery roll into streets that were peaceful yesterday. My relatives were in Kherson as it was being occupied.

How did Ukraine’s bridal-tourism industry become the book’s central anchor? What about it was interesting to you?

I actually spent years not wanting to write about that, because there is such a stereotyped association between Slavic women and the mail-order bride industry. But I kept being confronted by this Western........

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