Ben Sorgiovanni: 'What fiction does really well is capture the nuance of human experience'

This Winter series of podcasts got underway with Helga Schubert, who told us how she put together her short story On Getting Up from pieces of her past. This season we'll be hearing from Joanna Kavenna, Rachida Lamrabet and Julian George, but this time we meet Ben Sorgiovanni and his story No One Here Knows You.

He tells us how this story grew out of a philosophical thought experiment about how you would know there was a tiger in a forest if you'd never seen it, and why his characters were looking for a tiger, not a mouse.

"I think it's quite symbolically rich, this idea of a tiger," Sorgiovanni says. "I don't know exactly what it symbolises in the story, but I like the idea of the tiger there, in the national park somewhere, but out of view."

He reveals that – as it happens – he went to India and didn't see a tiger. But the line between his own experience and the experiences of his characters is something he still wants to explore.

"There are a whole bunch of interesting philosophical questions about the relationship between a philosophical article – which advances an argument – and a short story – which has a conclusion, but doesn't necessarily have an argument in the same sense."

Perhaps a subject for further study.

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