Name: Michael Salu
Nationality: British-born, Nigerian
Occupation: Writer, artist, scholar
Current publication: Michael Salu's new book Red Earth, is out via Calamari Archive.
Recommendations: Here are two books I recommend.

Macunaíma - Mário de Andrade
I recently met Katrina Dodson, the translator of this classic Brazilian novel, which is receiving acclaim and attention after being neglected for some time. The language and narrative moves seamlessly several indigenous folklore, anthropology and mythology and it is exciting, trippy and at times quite visceral.

Negrophobia - Darius James
Another rather visceral and little-discussed book, which I think is an important tome for the American conversation. Written using screenplay techniques, it is a scathing pustular satire of bombastic gaslighting American racism, told through outlandish caricatures, which I think speaks presciently to today’s outsize caricatures rebelling against the American order. I think of the likes of Kanye, for example. This book was written in the 90s, and feels fresh and relevant in  very semiotically-inebriated kind of sense.

If you enjoyed this interview with Michael Salu, visit his official homepage for a deeper look into his work.



When did you start writing? What what it about literature and writing that drew you to it?

I started writing about a decade ago. My role as creative director and art editor of Granta publications at the time, created a platform for me to express opinions on culture and society, through a variety of of public events and online spaces, which eventually lead to me writing short essays, and then, a little later, fiction and poetry.

I’ve been an avid reader from a really early age, a deeply personal interest, rather than something I pursued academically, as I studied art and design. Within those studies I was most drawn to theory, philosophy and literature. Literature has held a strong presence my whole life and has been crucial to helping me understand the world, but also how to build worlds and create narrative, with words or images.

Which authors, or books captured your imagination in the beginning?

My really early forays into literature came when I first got to know the library as a kid, which are now rapidly fading institutions, certainly in the UK.

I read books I was probably too young to really understand at the time, but these books clearly created a framework for comprehension. It was Roald Dahl first at the age of 5 or 6, then Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. I remember my mother buying a box set of Dahl’s works, which captured my attention for a long time. I distinctly remember his stories entering my dreams, especially the Fantastic Mr fox and the BFG.

Later, from about the age of seven or eight, I encountered, Dostoevsky, Dickens and Chester Himes, to name a few. In my teens it was Honore de Balzac, Albert Camus, Roland Barthes.

How would you describe your development as an author in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

I feel if one is inclined to write, it becomes a life long project. I started writing relatively late in my career. I mostly read in my twenties, rarely thinking about putting pen to paper myself.

My approach to writing is less about the desire to show I can be writer, or even to tell stories, but a strong desire to work through ideas, or theoretical and cultural observations I consider important to draw attention to. Creative writing offers me a way to deliver these observations obliquely.

I’d say challenges could come from making sure my work and intent are seen, as I often push against the structures of form and genre, but I enjoy this, not to be antagonistic, but to take an approach which best suits the creative idea I might have.

As a life-long journey, I hope to always write, but you never know. The synthesis from thought to word to page, is a way of strengthening, creatively enriching and working through what life can mean. As long as my mind is functioning, I think I’ll always write in some capacity.

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a reader and your creativity as a writer, please.  

In most respects I consider myself an outward facing writer, meaning, I like to look at the world and adopt a somewhat birds-eye view of things, sociologically and theoretically, powering my imagination to be able to tell stories both broad in scope or small and intimate.

Of course, who I am, my experiences and my cultural heritage deeply inform my work, as is evident in Red Earth, but I like to make clear how slippery and non-statistical these things are. I’m as much informed by my interest in, say, Russian literature, as I am by where my parents are from.

How do you see the relationship between style, form, plot and storytelling – and how would you rate their importance for you, respectively?

I can’t speak for others but I like constraints for my writing. Rather like Oulipo, the loose literary collective of the 60s, I like setting  parameters to work within, which might just be the mental imaginings of a town, or, like in my book Red Earth, I construct a fictitious radio show, and the host narrates the book, as a way of communicating with different frequencies of time and space.

I think my visual and design background also help, where I often set a parameter or two, using that constraint as a kind of fencing, which determines style, plot and so on.

Observation and research are often quoted as important elements of the writing process. Can you tell us a bit about your perspective on them?

Observation is constant and continuous. From watching people while riding the U-Bahn here in Berlin, paying attention to new trends filling the billboards at stations, to reading between the lines of media outlet opinion pieces, to the cultural critiques of memes. I take photographs, with some artistic intent, given I am primarily visually educated, but the photographs also work as a form of note-taking. A photo might spark an idea.

I find research crucial to structuring narrative or narrative concepts. It is easier to project forth in a speculative idea, when it is based on either qualitative of quantitative accumulations.

I’m part of a creative research group called Planetary Portals. We work from imperial archives to develop critical analyses and speculative narratives both in text and image, as a way of tracing the movement of resources across the globe over time. I made a film from this research, using the game engine software, Unity. The world of this film is designed with LIDAR scans and photogrammetry from the regions we’re researching.

This project is a perfect distillation of how I like to work.

How do you see the relationship between conscious planning and tapping into the subconscious; between improvisation and composition? When dealing with the end of a story, for example, do you tend to minutely map it out or follow the logic of the narrative as it unfolds itself?

I mostly allow the story to unfold, naturally.

With my book Red Earth for example, the entire work is a single poetic text, which meanders, as if catching contours, as if each loosely defined section is a wave, to meet and overlap the previous. This kind of approach I feel has has to come from comfort in what one has available, both technically and intuitively.

I don’t think I could write this way without deep reading and research, which gives me confidence to boldly play with form.

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

I’m generally quite a neurologically scattered person, and if I don’t create certain structures, my thoughts and actions during the course of a day can easily drift. So I need some routines.

Depending on what I have going on, I usually start the day with breakfast and a workout. If I am amidst a writing project, then, I would usually start a little earlier, and write for a couple of hours before the days needs creep in.

I operate a creative consultancy, which means my work can really vary from day to day, from meetings, to detailed time-consuming creative work, or out at the library or bookshop compiling research for written or visual projects.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, book, or novel that's particularly dear to you, please?

There’s a story I wrote a few years ago which probably encapsulates my writing process. I saw a small news story some years back, of a man who was pronounced dead, waking up in a morgue. Turned out he wasn’t dead, his body had sort of paused, which fascinated me.

I then got to thinking about what it must have been like to wake up in that metal box. This became an introspective and rather philosophical story, about consciousness and focused on the time between waking and his eventual discovery.

Literature works with sense impressions in a different way than the other arts. How do you use them in your writing?

I’m quite a visual writer, my visual arts background probably determines this. I’ll work ideas out as scenes, and paint descriptively with words, so the reader can find themselves within a space, or how a metaphor might illuminate that space or idea, and make it almost haptic.

I don’t think I’m synesthetic, but I do see imagery within words or sentences.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of literature in society?

Literature’s role has certainly shifted.

Two hundred years ago people (namely the classes with access to education) would look to novels as sociological, philosophical and political sources as well as entertainment. Stories had a much more prominent role in society. One thinks of the distinct bourgeoisie class examinations of Honore de Balzac, for example, or the early, slightly pre-industrialisation class struggles in the work of  Émile Zola.

Today, literature is more marginalised, and also, even, coddled. The industry can navel gaze a little, having determined and decided what an audience of readers looks like and what they want to read, which, I’d argue, can be narrow, and limit the kinds of works reaching the world and the reach literature could actually have, if it is more connected to our active contemporary reality. The more interesting work tends to be on the fringes.

I’m not sure how much readers look to the politics of a novel, and an explicitly political novel. There’s an inevitable political vertebrae to my work. It’s impossible for me to spend decades educating myself on the intricacies and imbalances that contribute to structuring and turning our world, without remarking or thinking about this in my work. Red Earth does exactly this, tracing interconnecting lines deep into modern history, to present a story about how climate, nature, geology, and the movement of bodies and resources over time all come together to show us where and who we now are.

We’ve told stories from the beginning of our species, in various forms, from gesture, to song, to visualisations, to even tilling, or gardening the land. I think storytelling is part of us, how we understand ourselves and how we’ve been able to construct identities and narratives in order to exist — narratives for a history, contested, official or neglected.

I think literature, although for many feels increasingly anachronistic, is still is important to shaping the vernaculars of communication. Even an instagram reel typically follows the technical fundamentals of narrative, with a vernacular that derives principally from film, and film takes its lead from the novel and the reel or the meme now takes on that visual grammar and fictionalised mode of existence.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has literature or poetry – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

I’d say I grappled with some of these themes from an early age. Being raised in the shadow of the church ensured that even at single digit age, I was grappling with notions of mortality. I think this is what led me to weighty works from writers like Dostoevsky, Camus and Arendt.

My interest in literature runs deeper than the technicality of language, but works that aim to offer reflections on things that keep us alive.

There seems to be increasing interest in a functional, “rational” and scientific approach to the arts. How do you see the connection between literature and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  

Indeed. It is arguably that our collective consciousness is increasingly structured by statistical taxonomies, but I think literature can remain the realm of fluid synthesises of thought and feel, the exchange between writer and reader, expansive and continuous, rather than binary.

Linguistics, the study of language, has been integral to computational development now for decades, but even with the sophisticated pattern recognition of today’s LLMs, human consciousness remains elusive, the brain, as matter, however much studied, still does not reveal the many intangible ways we relate to a world often indifferent to us, however much we attempt to impose our will and desires.

Art can be a purpose in its own right, but it can also directly feed back into everyday life, take on a social and political role and lead to more engagement. Can you describe your approach to art and being an artist?

I aim all my artistic work to contribute to the important dialogues we’re either beginning to have, or those we are yet to have but really should.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

It is useful to remind ourselves how much creativity has been turned into a market economy, and is therefore bound up subconsciously in what we need to see as output or productivity, whereas creativity is inherent within us and our desire to engage with the world, and potentially boundless if nurtured correctly.

Look at children for example.