Name: Tom Vater
Nationality: German, Asia-based
Occupation: Writer, editor
Current publication: Tom Vater's new book SHARKMAN, is out now. Order on Amazon.
Recommendations: Where to even start …
Two pieces of music that affected me – Exile on Main Street by the Rolling Stones and Bitches Brew by Miles Davis.
Two books that affected me – Youth by Joseph Conrad and The Master and Margerita by Bulgakov
Can’t think of two paintings specifically, but I do look at the work of JW Turner every time I am in London.

If you enjoyed this Tom Vater interview, and would like to know more about him, visit his official homepage or his clippings.me page. He is also on Instagram, Facebook, and twitter.



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

My bookish parents encouraged me to read. In high school I became editor of the student newspaper and promptly got into trouble for it. It seemed to me back then that words have power.

When I was 16, I did an internship with my home town’s newspaper and ended up reviewing countless rock bands passing through the area, my first writing job.

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

I read Enyd Blyton and Karl May, like lots of German kids growing up in the 70s. I also read many of the classics – Treasure Island remains a favorite – and I soon advanced to more sophisticated fare like The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, novels by Stanislav Lem.

By the time I reached my late teens, I was into the Beats – starting with Bukowski, I got hooked on Burroughs, Bowles, Kerouac and Ginsberg and Noir writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammet, Patricia Highsmith, Chester Himes, Jim Thompson and Ross McDonald.

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 didn’t search for a personal voice. I guess it emerged over the years.

There were no literary breakthroughs in terms of my development. In 1997, I found myself in a guest house in Kathmandu. At the time I travelled with a small grant from the British Library – I was on a mission to record and document indigenous music in South and Southeast Asia. The couple that stayed in the room next door had cycled to Nepal from Europe and were writing about their experiences. They asked me for help to edit their work.

I accompanied them to one of the local papers, The Rising Nepal, where I typed up one of their stories on an electric typewriter. The editor gave them 800 Rupees. I asked him whether he would give 800 Rupees if I gave him a story about Nepali folk music. A month later, I had the weekend supplement. I started writing my first novel then, The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu, and never looked back.

That was my epiphany and I’ve not done much else other than writing and playing a little guitar on the side since then. I am very lucky to have been able to turn my art into a living.

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.  

I am German and I moved to the UK when I was 18, where I studied and then played in a number of punk bands, so that informs my sense of identity to this day, though I have been living in Asia for decades.

I am a traveling writer (not a travel writer, though I do some travel writing), a natural next step from touring in transit vans around Europe in the late 80s and early 90s.

And while I prefer American writers to British ones, on the whole, I am deeply indebted to literary Britain for the development of my literary sensibilities. Back then, I read a lot of Iain Banks and Irvine Welsh.

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

Well, I write genre fiction – crime fiction with touches of espionage – for the most part.

Plot and story telling are really important, but I guess my style is informed by popular culture that goes way beyond fiction – I draw inspiration from popular music and visual arts, and of course journalism because that’s my day job.

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

All my fiction is essentially based on things I have seen, people I have met, historic moments I have witnessed and tragedies I have tried to process.

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 outline my work in quite some detail before I start writing. Otherwise I get lost and end up in cul-de-sacs from which it is difficult to extract oneself.

That said, when in the midst of writing, I often find that if I leave my text, go to sleep and return to it the next day, the characters appear to have mutinied and tried to run off in different directions. It’s my job to then reign them back in.

So that I suppose creates the tension between planning and tapping into the subconscious. It’s one of the most fun things I can imagine doing in my life.

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

That’s difficult as my days are not very regular. Prior to Covid, I travelled 25 years straight, never stayed anywhere longer than three months and only occasionally spent time at home.

I generally don’t bother with mornings, wake up around 10 or 11, do some admin, check social media, clean the house if at home. I start writing in the late afternoon and depending on deadlines and level of enjoyment, I might work straight through into the small hours.

If I am really deep in a project, this goes on for weeks.

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

The spark for my first novel, The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu, came about when I attended a birthday party of a friend who had done the Asia overland route in the 1970s. That night turned out to be a reunion with fellow travelers whom my friend hadn’t seen in a decade or so.

That gave me the idea of writing a book set on the hippie trail, with two timelines, one in the 70s and one in the late 90s when the erstwhile countercultural explorers reunite to process their common, dramatic past.

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

I imagine stories based on my own life experiences. That’s all there’s to it.

I recall smells, sights, quotes, people, and incidents from all over the place that seep into my writing.

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

I don’t know if literature still has a role in society.

We live in highly fragmented times, we are atomized, both by the capitalist, right wing philosophies of Thatcher and Reagan and the digital revolution that came in its wake. We went from ‘everyone out for themselves, there’s no society’ to ‘social media rage and isolation’ in a couple of generations. There are few if any writers in the digital age that have any impact on anyone other than their tiny, exclusive demographic.

My novels are, broadly speaking, all historic – they examine particular moments in 20th and 21st century history – the hippie trail across South Asia, the Khmer Rouge revolution in Cambodia, the CIA’s covert war in Laos, the War on Terror in Thailand, environmental collapse around the world, the rise of religious fascism in India.

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 would say, that childhood memories, real life on the road experience and fiction, music and visual arts have all shaped my understanding of the world.

I have a fundamental need to deconstruct and refashion the world into words.  

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?  

While there is plenty of rationality in technique and form when creating, there’s none in the content, in what’s being created. The artist is not responsible for creating anything functional, responsible or indeed scientific. I don’t see a clear connection and have not heard of a rational approach to the arts. Read up on Cormac McCarthy, he talks about science and writing.

That said, my latest book Sharkman is a True Crime non-fiction that reads like a thriller. In 1992, mechanic Peter Hauser and two friends bought three old cars and set off from southern Germany to cross the Sahara and drive to Togo, where they planned to sell their vehicles. They never reached their destination. The young, free-wheeling adventurers were ambushed by Tuareg bandits on the Algeria-Mali border, kidnapped and disappeared into the vast nothingness of the desert.

Thirty years later, Peter Hauser lives in a tent between jungle and ocean on a remote archipelago in Southern Thailand. Every day, Peter heads out into the deep blue to swim with tiger sharks, apex predators and masters over life and death, to find out what fear means to all of us.

I consider Sharkman a piece of art, but it’s also a true story culled from more than 25 hours of interviews. So, for this particular piece of work, scientific method helped shape the story.

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 don’t see that art has a purpose in its own right. If that’s the case, then we are talking about craft, not art, something purely decorative.

That’s not to denigrate work like that. But art that I pay any kind of attention to always contains some commentary on the world. Le Carré explained it thus, ‘The cat sits on the mat is not a story. The cat sits on the dog’s mat, that’s a story.’ Without conflict, there is no art. And all conflict invariably leads to politics and history. Treasure Island is a book about class war.

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?

Yes, I do. I am not very good at making a great cup of coffee. Nor is that an ambition of mine. I am blessed with not taking mundane tasks all that serious. That’s someone else’s job/mission/ambition.

It’s my job to tell stories. That’s perhaps no more important than making a great cuppa but it’s an altogether different undertaking.