In this episode of The Writing Life, we’re bringing you a conversation with debut novelist and creative writing teacher Priscilla Morris. Priscilla’s first novel Black Butterflies (Ducksworth Books) is the author’s personal response to the war that devastated her mother’s hometown of Sarajevo, Bosnia, in the former Yugoslavia, from 1992-1996.

Priscilla spoke to NCW Communications Assistant Molly-Rose Medhurst about her approach to researching and writing sensitively about the Siege and the atrocities of war, drawing from memory and from the recollections of family and friends. She also talks about her desire to centre the importance of community in the book and her narrative approach to time.

Priscilla and Molly’s conversation contains references to sexual assault, death, violence and the horrors of war linked to the Siege of Sarajevo. Please take care when listening.

Edited by Omni Mix

Image © Conor Horgan

Priscilla Morris is a British author who lives most of the year in County Monaghan, Ireland, and spends the winter months in Catalonia, Spain. She teaches creative writing at University College Dublin and has an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia.

Black Butterflies has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize and the Nota Bene Prize. It was chosen as Indie Fiction Book of the Month in May 2022. It has been translated into Bosnian by Lejla Džanko (Buybook, Sarajevo, 2023) and is currently being translated into Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Dutch, Arabic and Greek with more translations forthcoming. Black Butterflies will be published by Knopf in the United States and Canada in 2024.