Brooke Robinson

Brooke Robinson is professional playwright who has had her work produced at London’s Vault Festival and the Old Vic, among others. She grew up in Sydney, Australia, and has worked as a bookseller, university administrator, and playwright there and in the UK. She started writing The Interpreter, her first novel, when the pandemic ground the theatre world to a halt, and is currently working on her second novel.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I'm a big fan of titles that clearly and succinctly tell you what the work is about, particularly when we're talking about high concept stories. In the case of my book, The Interpreter, it does exactly what it says on the tin: it's about an interpreter in the criminal justice system who starts to deliberately mistranslate witness statements in order to help convict those who she believes are guilty.

What's in a name?

I must confess that naming characters is not a job I enjoy doing. I have also worked as a playwright and I love that in theatre you can name a character in a play simply after a letter like A or B. My main character, Revelle, is named after a young woman from my home city of Sydney, Australia who went missing in the 1990s. She is assumed to have been murdered, but her body has never been found, and police have never managed to arrest someone for long enough to keep them in custody. This speaks to my novel's themes of justice and the temptation to take the law into your own hands.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I know that I would not be able to be an interpreter in the criminal justice system myself, not only because I'm shamefully monolingual, but because I'd find it too hard to stay professionally detached and not take the cases home with me. Probably like a lot of people I do have vigilante fantasies but unlike my character Revelle, I'd never act on them as I am definitely a rule-follower who doesn't like to get in trouble!

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Most of my stories begin with something I've read about in the news. I'm particularly a big fan of talk radio - BBC Radio 4 here in the UK, and ABC Radio National when I'm in Australia. If I lived in the USA I'd have NPR on all day.

Visit Brooke Robinson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue