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Adelaide, Writers Week, March 2019 It was 41 degrees, and it was the furthest I have ever flown I was standing at the fringes of the opening night event when Gina Apostol arrived I recognised her: I had seen her on the cover of Publisher’s Weekly magazine, as Fiction Writer of the Year, 2018 I had read her novel, Insurrecto, and fallen for it completely Gina is a virtuoso stylist, without showing herself to be She writes as if she already knows who you are, and where you will be when you read her And as if she is what you need to be reading in order to survive the insanity of the world we live in We began a conversation that night, sitting down as the rest of the party carried on without us We kept going for the rest of the week, over dinners, at a Pussy Riot concert… and now, over email, months later, we talk about Insurrecto and We That Are Young, about life, grief, and what matters most in the process of writing, in the doing — Preti Taneja     Preti Taneja: I have so much to ask you about Insurrecto It’s such a deadly serious story, told with so much fierce verve that it’s also highly amusing and entertaining It’s both for readers who know nothing about the Philippines and for those who know a lot about it You have two main characters, a writer and a filmmaker, who also both happen to be women, going on a road trip in a time of political turmoil, dealing with historical trauma There’s a lot to talk about But I’m going to begin with something light-hearted Did you ever want to make movies?   Gina Apostol: No I have never wanted to do anything else but write fiction – then when I began writing novels, I did not want to do anything else but write novels I’m a pretty boring, monogamous, stubbornly prose-prone person I’m really just deeply interested in the form of the novel, in ways to challenge and yet also speak to that form It was odd when