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Stepping off from a real event—the brave action of a cellist playing Albinoni’s Adagio for twenty-two days on a heap of rubble where twenty-two civilians had been killed in a mortar attack—Steven Galloway’s book The Cellist of Sarajevo examines the people around the event. The story follows a man hurrying through dangerous streets to get water for his family, a baker who lives in the past, and the sniper charged with protecting the cellist as he plays.

The real Sarajevan cellist, Vedran Smailović, took issue with Galloway’s book and threatened to sue. “How can somebody steal your work … my sadness … my tragedy?” Smailović demanded, in an interview with the CBC. He threatened to burn his cello, along with a copy of Galloway’s novel.

The suit did not progress, and Smailović’s cello remained unburnt. But the question continues to plague writers: how do we work from our material, which is always real life, without infringing the rights and privacy of others? Steven Galloway was careful not to put words in the cellist’s mouth, and used his playing as the instigating incident rather than the main action of the novel. Does that discretion make it okay to write a real person into a novel? What’s the distinction between our own stories and those that belong, in some tenuous way, to somebody else? Is there a set of rules writers should or could adopt, a code for the inviolate ownership of private (or very public) life?

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Delve deeper into this conversation at the Reference Library's Appel Salon on Tuesday, April 15, 7 pm at the Keep Toronto Reading event– Fact into Fiction: A Balancing Act.

Greg Hollingshead, Helen Humphreys, and Nino Ricci have all written about real people in their novels, and have had to work out their own answers to these and other thorny questions The Cellist of Sarajevo brings up. Moderating this illustrious panel, Marina Endicott will pry into their private practices to illuminate the true story of writing historical fiction. Reserve your free tickets here.