KATARZYNA KUBISIOWSKA: Can you remember the first events in your life that made you aware of death?

OLGA TOKARCZUK: Nothing dramatic. Old family photos, evidence for people's absence. I realised that behind every person stands a crowd of the dead, from whom we descend, that the world we know is a continuation of worlds which have passed. What seems to be permanent and concrete, is in reality fleeting and momentary. I would stare for hours at the small old blurry photos in my grandmother's house. It's probably a natural start of the meeting with death. What comes first is always the death of others. It doesn't yet apply to us.

In a sense it does apply to us, but by the process of ageing. In "Final Stories" you describe in detail the bodies of ageing women, which are a kind of inverse image of the eternally youthful, efficient and effective superwoman, or perhaps better to say the 'supergirl' defined by modernity.

Life is the most patient preparation for death – the deaths of loved ones, and in the end the constant lessons which our own bodies give. The principal characters are women, but they are above all people. Your reading disturbs me a little. Is it possible that a female writer, writing about women, might be writing about people in general? If I were a man, it would easier to defend the book as universal. The fact that I am a woman puts it in a different light, brings forward different questions and emphasises a different type of interpretation. Questions about women's literature, about feminism, the body, even if straightforward and innocent, force me to explain myself in terms of my gender, which isn't asked of male writers. The maleness of literature is accepted as a certainty, as obvious. The culture within which I live is male-centric, it's a fact which one must simply accept with sadness. A writing woman is continually something out of the ordinary, eccentric.

Coming back to the theme of death, which in "Final Stories" fills every scene. The description of birth recalls dying. A woman looks at the death of her child, later her husband, Maja looks at the death of Kisz and the decaying bodies of turtles. Ida looks at the death of a dog, and this animal death seems to be her death, the dog teaches the human the art of dying.

It is a book about death, I thought of it like this from the beginning. It talks about human rituals in the face of death – not only in the third person, death as something objective, but also the death that touches the second person, of someone close, someone grieved over. You, but in the end your own death. Taking this point of view is also to encompass the other, 'ordinary' death. Life is overgrown with death.

Where did the idea come from to show a person's death in the way it was experienced by Ida?

This idea has a long history. It's a type of more or less specific instructions for crossing to the other side. We know versions of this from Egyptian and Tibetan literature. In the middle ages it functioned as ars bene moriendi, the art of dying well. In Polish literature it probably never appeared in its pure form, but we remember "The conversation of Mr Polikarp with Death" or "The Complaint of the Dying", a very strange poem, whose verses start with each letter of the alphabet. I used these forms, somewhat loosely, in the second part of the book. But it's above all a folk tale, in which the soul of the hero sets out on the road (becoming conscious stage by stage of his own death), and who in the end realises that he is already on the other side. It's a small, somewhat forgotten literary genre. Forgotten, because death too is dismissed, hidden, reduced to a secret moment, at the most made public in an obituary and a de-ritualised funeral. Few treat death today as a process, a passage, as opposed to some kind of dramatic moment.

In Buddhism, the dead person, for a period after their death is convinced they are still alive. This motif is used in more and more film screenplays such as 'Jacob's Ladder', 'Mulholland Drive', 'The Sixth Sense', 'The Others'. Maybe these conceptions are a modern equivalent of the middle-ages ars bene moriendi? Maybe they now give us lessons about dying?

I think so, yes. The popularity of Eastern philosophy changes somewhat the perspective from which we look at many things, which in our culture were neglected, unmentionable or overlooked. Including death. The idea of bardo made us aware, as people of the West, of the depth and sense - how to describe it? - of the culture of dying. Although the Western equivalent of bardo appears in the tales of souls who, after the death of the body, return to the earth in order to avenge wrongs, settle scores, to prepare for the final departure.

Living in the countryside habituates one to death. Here it is easy to see disintegration and transience. People are not afraid of the dead and don't fear what happens after death. Urban civilisation strips death of its reality, as well as its metaphysical dimension.

But today an inhabitant of a metropolis encounters death daily via the media. It's full of death, but in a very abstract, again intangible form, as information, as an image. And again it is a distant, other form of death. Death has been fragmented on the one hand into an abstract event, by the media. On the other hand biological death has become dying in hospital, where a person is on a respirator, stoned on drugs. Between the two there is no place for the death of the person, the human, with their past, memories, individuality. Nobody "helps" us to die, nobody teaches this to us. It seems that there is only life, young and healthy, and then suddenly nothing. Old age is always ugly, horrible, deserving of sympathy. Deprived of all dignity. Especially the old age of women.

You employ some fairly eccentric literary devices, at least in 'Parki', the second part of "Final Stories", where letters are traced out in the snow - the message to the world that Petr is dead.

That's a true story. I often have the feeling that reality is too explicit, even in bad taste because of its arrogance and lack of moderation. Despite appearances, if writers could create reality, it would look so much more balanced and predictable. That's why it is so difficult these days to write realistically. I heard the story of an old woman tracing the announcement of her husbands death in the snow a few years go. In fact, it was supposed to have happened near Lewin Kłodzki. I decided to keep the location too, which helped me to place the first two parts of "Final Stories" in Kotlina Klodzka.

You raise in this book the problem of reducing suffering. Do you support euthanasia?

Yes. Situations exist which can't be subordinate to the law. I consider that a person has the moral right to decide the moment of their own death and to die in dignity. I would like to have that right, and I would like others to have it too.

For people of faith euthanasia is a barbaric interference in the divine order.

Not necessarily. Many people of faith support euthanasia. They believe that God created them as free beings, who are responsible of their own choices.

Animals appear in all your books, treated with particular respect. What role do they play in your life?

Travelling companions. Commentators on events. Another viewpoint. Other, new dimensions of closeness and belonging. A wealth of dissimilarities. New languages of communication. Uncommon learning. Everyday humour. Basic, fundamental, peace. Cats – natural meditation. At home, I have a kind of inter-species community which although it’s subject to tensions, manages to co-exist peacefully and companionably. It does one good to be part of something like that. I suspect that we render services to each other which are difficult to define, not only those that are specifically to do with housekeeping. Dogs living with people become humanised, their personality becomes richer. People who are in contact with animals become similarly enriched. It's a deep mutual learning and connection. Who knows, perhaps it's exactly animals who can teach us how to die with dignity. I brought this idea into "Final Stories". But there's also the case, that for the "internet surfer" the animal world, nature in general, can become something threatening and strange, something horrible.

"Final Stories" is made up of stories about three related women of different ages. All of them have unsuccessful marriages behind them. At first glance this would appear to be the consequence of a "genetic" disposition, that from generation to generation the mother transmits the pattern condemning them to disasters in their private lives. But after a careful reading, in each of these stories we find that it's not a question of inheritance, but rather a question of irreconcilable differences between the sexes.

I wouldn't say that they are unsuccessful marriages. I'd rather call them difficult relationships. Easy, happy relationships only exist in Harlequin romance novels.
I don't think that all the differences between men and women are cultural, but definitely the majority are. They are so strongly beaten into our heads that we take them to be natural. The differences between men and women don't interest me. Between people, very much so. These are so numerous, they are worth examining. People have, for example, very different political and religious preferences, they can even kill for these reasons, they have dramatically different visions of the world, rhythms of life, tastes. They are different on many levels. A lack of understanding affects the characters in "Final Stories". The result of this is loneliness, maybe the most widespread feeling today, but also separation, drifting, surfing across life.
I recently watched the film "The Village". The most fascinating for me was not the horrific aspect, but the life of a small community, cut off from the world, relying on each other, close knit, I envied it – the community was made up of "a place for everyone" whether they were gifted or disabled. I realise that this is to a certain degree a utopian myth applied to times "before", before industrialisation, two cruel wars, globalisation. And I also realised, to what extent it is still very attractive.
Loneliness in a small world is something to be overcome, to be alleviated. In a wider world without borders – it blurs and dissipates people, they become vulnerable to all kinds of attraction, spin and manipulation, they lose their sense of orientation. Unconsciously they nevertheless need rituals, something that will enable them to face up to death. They perform lame, incomplete rituals, without being aware of it. Because it's not possible to live in perpetual suspension, a person has to tell their story, define themselves. This is exactly the position of the main character in the last story in the book.

In your early books it's difficult to detect any traces of your personal experience. In "House of Day, House of Night", you vividly open the door to your autobiographical sources, and in "Final Stories" there are three characters called Olga. What do they have in common with you?

How would it be possible to write a book without relying on your own experience? It's a question of referring to it, either directly or indirectly. All of my characters take something from me, are in some sense me. Even if they don't come out of my experience, they are nevertheless seen through my eyes. Maybe they are presentiments of me, possibilities, potential versions of me. I always understand my writing to be very personal, a very intimate statement directed at the reader, I narrate my world to them and count on them to find a place for it in their world, so we can make it somehow mutual. If I manage to do this, the book lives, if not, it dies. Sometimes it gets through only to a small group.