India, July 12 -- 1What sort of research went into writing Remote Sympathy? Remote Sympathy had its seeds last century, when I was studying German in Berlin in the early to mid 1990s. Our university professor took a group of foreign students on a trip to the Buchenwald concentration camp, which is part of the beautiful town of Weimar, which is seen as the cradle of German culture. We stayed in the former SS barracks. I realised that the citizens of Weimar, who form a chorus in the book, could not possibly say they didn't know what was happening on the hill above their town. Yet they maintained this. The town was cheek-by-jowl with these horrors. The officers overseeing the camp lived in a little collection of about 10 beautiful villas and raised their families there. When I went to the camp archives, I looked through photo albums of those men. In it, their children could be seen playing in the gardens, learning to ride bikes, and going for outings to the camp zoo, which was established for the enjoyment of the officers' families, when there was a human zoo right there that nobody seemed to want to know about. That planted the seed: the idea of wilful ignorance and our human capacity to look away from the things that cause us discomfort or make us feel guilty. 2You noted in an interview that you take great care to avoid "too much horror centre stage". It feels like you're cheapening a story if you put that horror centre stage, especially with the Holocaust. I've written two books set in Nazi Germany and, with both of them, I didn't want to put horror in the centre. There have been so many books written about that period where the horror is unrelenting. And we have the reader sitting in their comfortable home or lying warm in their bed, reading about these atrocities. It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth to re-exploit those stories for a reader's titillation. In my view, such violence can re-victimise the people who were the object of those actions. So I make a conscious effort to keep it off-stage. 3Is it difficult for authors from New Zealand to be recognised by the global publishing industry? It's hard to get a foothold in the rest of the world, as an Antipodean writer. You have to make a lot more noise to get noticed. I know it's still hard to get the same kind of review attention for your books. I know that my publisher was quite pleased when I said that I was setting a book in the UK rather than in New Zealand. But I don't make those decisions based on commercial viability. I write the story that is singing to me the loudest. As New Zealand writers, we do feel a pressure to look outward to that international market and think about those decisions in a more commercial way than a creative way, which is a shame....