We define identity as the quality of being the same in nature or particular qualities as another person, a sameness that is upheld at all times and circumstances, unchanged throughout the various phases of our existence. It is formed by nationality, ethnicity, our particular generation, gender, sexuality, religion and other beliefs. It is a truism that as individuals we can’t escape who we are, but as writers we can become someone else – or fade into almost nothing if it suits our work. Writing is a perfect way to conceal or disguise our identity: unlike a singer, let’s say, or an actor, readers don’t see a writer’s face in their work, don’t hear them speak, can’t tell their age or sex, often can’t guess their nationality.

                A painter is similarly invisible, too, but the fine artist isn’t laden with the burden of identity. His or hers is an art form that in non-totalitarian regimes has licence to be appreciated primarily for its imaginative, aesthetic or intellectual content, whereas writing – and I mean fiction, too – is by many expected to instruct, educate, disseminate, argue, be the loudhailer of the people whose identity the writer happens to share. He or she can be all that, by all means, but I wish a writer was allowed more of the individualism of the fine artist, allowed to speak for no one but themselves alone.

                Paradoxically, by being more original, more individualistic a writer’s voice becomes, I believe, more universal, timeless, more likely to appeal to a reader a hundred years from now. But what does universality mean? The word, and the whole concept I suppose, is a bugbear for many, rather like globalisation, but personally I understand universality in fiction as the quality in a story that makes it readily comprehensible to a reader who has little or no prior knowledge of the history, politics, culture, language or even geography of the place where it is set. And all that without the story losing its nuances or the writer compromising – God forbid – their artistic integrity and intention.

                Does a book have to have universal appeal? Of course not. There are great works of fiction that are quite demanding on the reader’s knowledge of their subject matter, but a writer should be allowed to aspire to a book of universal reach if they wish to without risking the scorn of fellow practitioners, reviewers and readers.

                How does a work of fiction becomes universal? The trick is not a je ne sais quoi, but a series of deliberate artistic choices, which target the sort of temporal references mentioned earlier. Let me say here that striving for universality doesn’t mean a writer should necessarily be shying away from specific details – historical, social, geographical etc. – only that he or she should be presenting them in a way that could be understood without too much effort by a reader who is unfamiliar with the book’s subject matter. Let the demands on the reader to be about the essence of the story, its themes, its characters, its narrative technique and argument, if it has one, rather than the stage where the story plays out.

                Some times, as part of that strategy, a writer might even choose to conceal their identity or alter it, and a great part of one’s identity is indeed one’s nationality. Yet fewer countries are monocultural these days (were they ever?). What does it mean to be Greek, Irish, German or South African? It certainly means something, but not the same thing to every national of the same country, many of whom may even be resident abroad. A writer’s work is informed by their personal experiences, the history of the country they grew up, their education, the country or countries they have lived in, each factor changing their identity to the point that it is difficult if not outright impossible to match it with another’s beyond some broad general characteristics like their common modes of social interaction, their shared religion and common language, of course. Therefore, it seems to me, that what we understand as a people’s shared identity is of little use when trying to interpret a literary work, and could in fact do more harm than good because that commonality, those few characteristics that the writer shares with others tempt the reader to read a book with the prejudice of national or other stereotypes.

                This is why writers keep declining the responsibility of being spokespersons for this or that ethnicity, religion, social class or sexual orientation, which limits their artistic ambition, weighs them down with the fear of misrepresentation or misinterpretation. A writer’s opinions represent only their own – perhaps even not one’s own in same cases when he or she is compelled to agitate, to question, to shock and challenge the reader.

                Besides, people are shaped much more by their emotional experiences, the inner struggles of childhood, their brain chemistry and random acts of life, which create an identity that changes direction several times over the course of a lifetime. It happens to everyone, but nowhere else is it better documented than in the work of a writer whose books have the good fortune to stay in print decade after decade: we only have to read back to their earlier work to see how a liberal has turned conservative, the shock artist a complacent prude, another has had their midlife crisis or Road to Damascus moment, the avant-gardist has become a rear-guardist. Therefore, in this practicioner’s opinion, it undercuts and misinterprets a writer’s work to associate it too closely with some in-group identity.

                Language is also assumed to form a large part of one’s personal identity, but how many languages exclusively belong to a specific territory or nation? Certainly not English, French or German. Italian is spoken in Switzerland and San Marino, with local dialects spoken in Croatia and Slovenia. Greek is spoken in Cyprus, too, but is also recognised as a minority language in parts of Italy, Albania, Armenia, Romania and Ukraine. So we can’t quite say that language by itself defines identity. Obviously, since written language is the means through which a writer communicates with their reader, one assumes that the writer’s mother tongue is the sine qua non of his or hers artistic identity, but it is not uncommon these days to come across writers who eschew their mother tongue for another in their work, a practice that only recently I learnt that it is called exophony. It must have always been the case that people wrote creatively in another language, but I have the feeling that it was rarer in the past for an exophonic writer to rise to prominence (Conrad, Beckett and Nabokov come to mind).

                Since exophony is generally practised in the language of the writer’s adopted country, it is not surprising that it is more frequent nowadays when the kind of migration that isn’t driven by absolute economic necessity but can partly be a lifestyle choice, especially in the European Union, is more common. Poor first-generation worker immigrants had other priorities than communicating their experiences or expressing their artist sensitivities on paper, but the sizable population of middle-class, well-educated migrants of today has both the means and confidence to do it. There is also, I think, a greater appetite for minority writing than in the past (even though still small compared with the popularity of commercial fiction) thanks to the internet and the multiculturalism of Western societies, and publishers, whatever their shortcomings, are responding to it.

                A writer might choose to write in a language other than their mother tongue in the hope of gaining a wider readership, for political reasons, or simply for stylistic reasons. Writing in a foreign language can have obvious shortcomings, but I believe that it also helps a writer distance themselves from their subject matter in a healthy way. Speaking in our mother tongue is almost an automatic response. True, writing in it is not quite the same, but there is still something instinctive about it, obeying the rules of standard grammar and syntax learnt over years at school. Trying to do it in a foreign language forces one to think harder about that process of placing words next to each other to form sentences that make sense not just to the writer but their readers, too. One isn’t quite as natural as a native speaker at it, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. An apt analogy would be the sense of vision. When we look at something with naked eye we don’t think of the process by which the image arrives at our cornea and makes its way to the brain through the optic nerve, we are just too busy thinking of what we are actually looking at. A photographer, on the other hand, is at all times conscious of their camera lens and its controls, its zoom and focus functions as well as the distortion that his lens causes to the image. In my experience, exophonic writers are all too aware of the mechanics of their adopted language, too, even if they don’t always quite know how to control it. As they grow more confident, they start to feel at greater liberty to alter, bend and stretch their adopted language to suit their own aesthetic. We’ve long seen that in postcolonial literature, where writers from former colonies for whom English is their mother tongue have long felt the need to adapt language to their needs (and I’m sure the same applies to French or Spanish). What needs might those be? The need vividly to render social situations, dialogue, sounds and mannerisms that isn’t there in the original colonial language. A native speaker from the centre doesn’t have to do all that: their language has already, or, rather, is slowly and collectively been formed by their Western experiences. We are also familiar with the exophonic approach to language in the works of Conrad and Nabokov (I can’t say about Beckett because I don’t speak French). We can feel in the text how those writers often refuse to accept any word but the right one for the occasion, how their English oozes with lexical delight.

                So where does that modern babel leave us? In a happy state I like to think. A writer who casts aside elements of their original identity in their work is at the same time adopting, by the very act of abandoning the old one, a new identity, which is more relevant to their present way of thinking than their accident of birth, an identity that can be an amalgam of various identities or a completely new one, a process that reflects a world in a state of greater flux than ever before.

                An accomplished lepidopterist, Nabokov would understand how people – academics and critics more than ordinary readers, it has to be said – can’t resist the urge to classify, to catalogue, to create order out of that modern-day chaos of identities. To do so they have to treat writers a little like a species, and as diligent naturalists pick them up with their tweezers and fix them onto a cork sheet with a pin through the chest next to a little piece of paper with a short description.

                One should not complain; after all, we writers look splendid behind the polished glass of the display case on the wall.