"I Believe there is a God-shaped hole troubling our moral existence..."
Novelist and screenwriter Ozgür Uyanik answers the Wales Arts Review Q&A.
Turkish-born novelist and screenwriter Ozgür Uyanik answers the Wales Arts Review Artist Q&A and talks influences, process, and the distractions of Cardiff street life.
Where are you from and how does it influence your work?
I was born in Türkiye and raised in the UK from an early age. Having spent plenty of time growing up in both countries and keeping my mother tongue intact, I have ended up bilingual and I tend to regard myself as bicultural too although the latter might well be an illusion, I suspect. Nevertheless, my in-betweenness seems to compromise any sense of unequivocal belonging and this perceived split-identity is probably a significant influence on my work if I had to hazard a guess.
Where are you while you answer these questions, and what can you see when you look up from the page/screen?
At my desk by a first-floor bay window overlooking a high street on the outskirts of Cardiff: shops, people, traffic, noise. It’s all very distracting actually. In fact, my initial answer to this question ballooned into the beginnings of a short story. Maybe I ought to move my desk!
What motivates you to create?
A desire to produce artefacts of sufficient merit that I might be bold enough to share them with the world without feeling ashamed of having spent so much time working on them and even more time thinking about working on them. The sunk cost fallacy (is it all that fallacious?) makes it impractical—or psychologically impossible—to stop trying to create stuff despite the voice that sometimes pipes up with a tone of sadistic relish saying to you, what’s the point? Well, ars gratia artis, you reply pugnaciously and keep on trucking…
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