Known more for her work in media and T.V, Cardiff born Gaby Koppel has turned her talents to fiction, with her debut novel Reparation on the shelves now. Chris Andrews caught up with the multi-talented writer for a chat.

Reparation is your first novel. What made you want to switch to fictional writing and write a novel?

I’ve always wanted to write but in the past channelled it into journalism.  I love the process of sitting by the keyboard, always have, but got into the habit of always writing about other people. Not myself. One of the things that pushed me to act was that I had breast cancer in 2003 and you suddenly realise that life won’t be forever, if you want to do something you better get on with it.

You were brought up in Cardiff after your parent came here as refugees following WWII. What are your earliest memories of Cardiff?

I was born in Cardiff – in Charlotte Square, Rhiwbina to be precise.  It’s a street that is set around a huge square of grass with cherry blossom trees planted in fours.  My earliest memories are of the great adventure of life out on the square.  Rhiwbina is a suburb of Cardiff but it really felt like living in a village, because everybody knew each other.  My parents and their circle of refugee friends and relatives recreated the atmosphere of the Mittel European café society, with foods that many of our neighbours probably never heard of. That sense of being different from the outside world did stay with me from my earliest years and ultimately made me want to write.

With the current backlash against refugees the world over, do you recall there being a backlash against refugees at that time?

You never forget that you are a refugee, and my parents spoke about it a great deal.  There is a real sense of loss, my father for example felt profoundly German.  He was an engineer, a profession he felt was respected in his native country but not at all in the UK, he always used to say ‘There I would be Herr Doktor Ingineur’.  But by the time he went back to Germany he was seen as British and so he felt he didn’t fit in anywhere.   My mother said that being stateless after she escaped from Communist Hungary was the most awful experience as nobody would stand up for you.

Reparation, amongst other things deals with the abduction of a child. Did your work with Crimewatch and other factual programmes you’ve produced give you an oversight of how the media, families and victims deal with this kind of thing?

It was a huge privilege to work on Crimewatch, and yes I did draw on my own personal experience to write the book in all sorts of ways.  I now live in Hackney and have strong relationships with people in the Hassidic or orthodox Jewish community who live there.  There’s a lot of misunderstanding about that community and I wanted to depict them in a realistic way as normal people, rather than as oddities. In some ways, the figure of the little girl symbolises the lost childhood of both my leading characters, both of them in some way have failed to grow up, they are at times childish and petulant, maybe because of trauma has stunted their emotional growth. 

The character of Mutti was a very interesting character. Was there a real life inspiration for her?

Mutti is so closely modelled on my own late mother that when my cousin read the first chapters she asked me where the fiction part of it was.  My mother Edith was a great personality, both brilliant and tragically damaged and when I sat down to write I realised that I could never invent a character as unusual and complex as her.  I also realised that I knew and understood her better than anybody else apart from my father who is not around anymore, and so only I could do justice to her. 

Another theme that resonates throughout Reparation is motherhood and loss. Being a mother yourself did you look inward for inspiration for Elizabeth’s character?

Elizabeth is a version of me, a kind of earlier version of me that is permanently stuck in adolescence.   She doesn’t know her own mind, and underestimates the degree that she is deeply emotionally entwined with her mother. There’s a dysfunctional love between them.  They like to bait each other.  I’ve written the book from the perspective of a daughter rather than a mother, though, and even if my own mum had pretty obvious flaws, she drank too much and behaved in a pretty atrocious way at times, but underneath it all she was extremely wise and insightful.

They say everybody has one good book in them. Is this your one book or will there be more to follow?

It’s just the start!  Watch this space.