A novel to write home about

ANNE MICHAELS is fascinated by emigration. Daughter of a Polish father and Canadian mother, she was born in Toronto in 1958, and lives there still. But she has become increasingly aware that few of her generation live in the place where they were born.

“I am very conscious of that,” she says, as we chat for a few hours before her reading at The Dublin Writer’s Festival.

“I think that affects the core of us. Do you belong to the place where you were born, or the place where you are buried? Or do you belong to the place where your children were born? There has been this profound change, and it’s one I don’t think we quite acknowledge,” she says.