Bronte Coates talks with Ceridwen Dovey about her new collection of short stories.

Only the Animals has a distinct set-up: told from the perspective of ten different animals, each story depicts how they lived and died during human conflicts, and throughout, pays homage to a particular real-life author. Where did this unusual premise come from?

The task I set myself for this book was to see if I could take these over-determined, already obsessively ‘gone over’ experiences of horror, pain and suffering – these human conflicts from late colonial times at the turn of the last century all the way through to the aftershocks of 9/11 and the war on terror at its end – and, by gazing at the same conflict through the eyes of an individual creature, a non-human animal, shock myself (and anybody who might read the book) into feeling something authentic. I wanted to short-circuit the rational retelling of these conflicts in history and avoid the usual dry focus on technology and leaders and outcomes and politics through the absurdity of a talking animal soul speaking from beyond the grave about the way he/she died in a particular conflict. And perhaps – because you’re not morally obliged to feel anything, as you would for a human – you can let yourself see that conflict from this skewed perspective on such a massive painful mess; and maybe that helps you to understand what it might have been like, a quick insight into the lived experience of it, a jolt of experience. It’s that alienating effect of gazing through an animal’s eyes that I think can be most powerful.

But right from the beginning of the project, I also knew this was territory that many, many other authors had covered. The year I wrote the first story (the parrot story, in a different form), I was reading Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, and while doing research for the story I went back to Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot and of course the original Flaubert story about a woman’s relationship with a parrot, A Simple Heart – and I was searching for a way for the stories not to be relentlessly depressing: here’s another animal that was killed, and here’s how they died; and here’s another and another… So I decided that each animal soul should also pay tribute to other authors who had worked in this symbolic space before – and in this way put a bit of hope and humour in the stories, to signal that along the way of human history, some of our best writers have tried to find a way to say something meaningful about animals, or conflict, or both. There’s something hopeful in this, an antidote to all the terror and pain.

The authors you feature include Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, Henry Lawson, José Saramago, Colette, and more. How did you decide on these particular writers?

The process of writing each story was slightly different – sometimes the animal came first, sometimes the author, sometimes the conflict – and sometimes it was only in researching an animal or human conflict that I came upon an author who had written about animals in some form in his/her fiction that seemed relevant to what I was trying to say. I learned so much writing this book; it really was an education for me – and a chance to immerse myself in the writing of authors I’d never read, or not read properly before. For example, I knew Colette had owned a cat, but I’d never read her work before, and it was only in reading her essays and fiction that I discovered that she really did visit her new husband at the front during World War One, and from there the rest of the story developed. Similarly, I wrote the dolphin story soon after I had my son, so I was interested in the nurturing side of dolphins, and by chance I was reading a biography of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’s marriage, and through that discovered Hughes’s animal poems for children – and it suddenly seemed natural for the dolphin to be writing directly to Sylvia Plath.

One of the motivations behind your book is to inspire empathy. What are some books you’ve read that have done this for you?

I believe every single book I’ve ever read – even the bad ones, even the ones I’ve hated – have, through their very existence, inspired empathy in me, or contributed to my ability to feel empathy, and I think this is true for all of us. It’s why reading to young children is so important – it’s one of the ways they learn to experience empathy for other people, other creatures, which – if we go back to the word’s Greek root, simply means something along the lines of ‘in feeling.’ If we can’t imagine ourselves into somebody else’s experience of the world, we can’t feel anything for what it might be like to be them. Cruelty is, in a way, a failure of imagination.

You were raised between Australia and South Africa, and also studied at Harvard University. Has living across these different cultures, with different cultural views of animals, played into your fiction and your depiction of creatures?

The experience of moving between being an insider and an outsider has certainly played into my fiction – as has my training as a social anthropologist, where the goal is to be a permanent and professional outsider. I’ve been a long-time fan of the amazing scholarly work being done in the field of animal/human studies – I think if I had managed to finish my PhD in Social Anthropology, I would have chosen a thesis topic that had something to do with this; one of my close friends, Rowena Potts, who is an anthropologist, makes these remarkable short films that are portraits of a city through the eyes of urban animals, for example, the crows of Calcutta. In the twenty-first century, animals are the ultimate outsiders, mostly exiled from normal interactions with us.

And one more question – who is on your current reading list?

Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers and Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America.