In this interview, Guernica Editions editorial contributor and Indian author Aashisha Chakraborty speaks with Ruth Taylor about Even the Birds, Taylor’s debut novel and winner of the 2025 Guernica Prize for Literary Fiction. Their discussion explores themes of war, memory, and how three women find their way back to each other in the aftermath of the Guatemalan conflict.
Aashisha Chakraborty (AC): Your novel begins at peace. Isabel comes home from war to a daughter and a country that have both moved on without her. Is there a reason that you started the story in the aftermath rather than in the conflict itself?
Ruth Taylor (RT): I arrived in Guatemala a couple of years before the peace was signed, so what I witnessed and lived through was the transition to peace. But I also found that transition to be in some ways more interesting than the war itself (of course, there are many powerful and engaging stories there, too). The very high stakes during wartime can prevent or postpone the kind of questions that arise in its aftermath (something the novel examines). Also, my impression is that there are many more novels and stories set in wartime (because of those same high stakes, I imagine). Fewer explore the aftermath, which is, after all, what we’re left with and have to live with going forward. I thought maybe I could contribute something there. I was also interested in what it feels like to lose the war when you continue to believe your aims were just. How to live with that.
AC: Soraida is fascinating. The conservative aunt who raises Yasmin and is forced to share her home with a niece she barely recognizes. She could easily have been a villain, but she isn't. How did you keep her sympathetic?
RT: I love Soraida—even if I think she’s wrong half the time. Her views are built out of privilege and received wisdom. But that same inheritance has imposed certain ideas of duty on her, which is why she ends up with a rebel niece living under her roof. The thing that I think elevates her is her heart. Once she is forced to open her eyes to the people around her, she can’t help but feel for them. Isabel’s inopportune arrival helps her do that.
AC: Yasmin is fifteen, and she's carrying the weight of two very different women who love her. What was it like writing a teenager navigating that and did she ever surprise you by taking the story somewhere you hadn't planned?
RT: I deliberately wrote Yasmin (whom I also love) as somewhat opaque, a bit of mystery. The two point-of-view characters are Isabel and Soraida, and Yasmin’s words and actions confound them both. I hoped this would capture the way adolescence can appear to adults, while not robbing Yasmin of her complexity and humanity. I feel deeply for her, but I also have great faith in her. To some extent, her actions drive the plot, so she is not minor in my view even if we don’t know all her inner workings. And yes, she surprised me—not so much by the things she did as by the things she would say. Her turns of tenderness, her insights, her capacity for forgiveness.
AC: Isabel contains contradictions. As someone who loves to read and write about contradictions myself, I wanted to know about the ‘wound’ at Isabel’s centre that makes her who she is.
RT: I think one of the things that makes Isabel complex is that she is a person (unlike Soraida) who is always questioning. This habit comes in part from her parents, but also because she has experienced different “worlds” (urban, rural; Kaqchikel, ladino) and lived through a series of upheavals. She is a guerrilla fighter, a mother, a woman of mixed heritage and, as you say, has a central wound. She was robbed of her childhood—that time of innocence when the world is or should be a safe place. To me, this is at the root of her sense of instability and of her search to make the circle whole again.
AC: Where did the title come from? ‘Even the Birds’ is the kind of phrase that lodges in you. I'd love to know what it means inside the novel.
RT: The phrase “even the birds” appears on the very first page—the guerrilla fighters are marching through the jungle without speaking and “even the birds are silent.” It appears in a couple of other places as well. What the title means to me is that this war touched everything—even the birds. And that is actually true. I’ve been told that in the areas of the jungle that sheltered the guerrilla forces and later, for ten years or more, sheltered whole communities who’d fled from the army, many bird species disappeared for years from overhunting. Birds feature here and there in other ways in the novel, too. Isabel’s mother calls her little bird. Yasmin takes flight like a bird.
AC: There's a question underneath this whole novel about what we owe each other across generations, across the wounds of history, across political disagreements within a family. Do you think fiction can do something for that kind of reckoning that journalism or history can't?
RT: Fiction personalizes these questions, which can make them relevant to the reader in a way that more externalized accounts may not be able to. It can offer paths to understanding by showing us what that might look like in ways that are concrete but also acknowledge the messiness and complexity of life. I don’t think either journalism or history looks at these questions, which are fundamentally about human relationships at the micro level, even if the reverberations or implications reach beyond the micro. But this is the level where people live their lives and where, I think, they are most likely to be able to see and feel, maybe even implement whatever it is the novel is communicating. But I also think any change wrought by journalism, history or fiction is unlikely to come from a single work. It’s the cumulative effect of reading widely that has the biggest impact.
AC: What would you want a Guatemalan reader to think while reading this book?
RT: One of the novel’s themes is memorialization, which continues to be an important topic in Guatemala. The novel can in some sense be read as a memorial to the people who were or are still targeted by state-sponsored or privately sponsored violence and to the people who sought to change an unjust world. That’s one thing a Guatemalan reader may see in it and value. Another—and this came from a Guatemalan reader—is that in Guatemala, although there is a growing pool of testimonial literature about the war—which is of great value—little of what has been written acknowledges the psychological or generational impacts. Finally, for some readers, I hope they recognize something of the places they know or the experiences they or their friends or family had in its pages. It’s just one story. It doesn’t pretend to represent more than these particular characters and the challenges they face. But few novels in English take place in Guatemala during these years, so amplifying those experiences is also something I hoped to do.
AC: Isabel is of mixed Mayan and non-Indigenous heritage, and the novel moves through questions of identity and belonging in a country still reckoning with what the war meant for Indigenous communities. How did you research and write toward that with care? Were there voices (writers, historians, people you knew in Guatemala) who shaped how you approached it?
RT: Any attempt to write about experiences and perspectives that are not your own cannot be taken lightly. The voices that informed my approach to the character of Isabel and to the Mayan communities mentioned in the novel are many. Indigenous Mayans are a majority in Guatemala (or near majority, depending whose figures you believe). They are family, friends, co-workers, colleagues. Beyond that, the news agency I worked for privileged the voices of Indigenous people, women, campesinos, activists, and the impoverished majority. So I had more access than many of my colleagues to Indigenous leaders and community members. I worked closely with Indigenous leaders and activists in other capacities as well. While writing the novel in Canada, I tried to immerse myself as best as I could in books about Kaqchikel and other Mayan traditions, practices, perspectives, and world views. Karina Siguil, who is of mixed Mayan and non-Indigenous heritage, read the manuscript and gave feedback. Lastly, because none of the Kaqchikel friends I contacted read English and they could not recommend anybody else who did, I translated the sections of the novel that touch on Kaqchikel language, culture and world view into Spanish, and Juan Everardo Chuc Xum (a Kaqchikel newspaper columnist who formerly worked with the Guatemalan Academy of Mayan Languages) read them and provided feedback.
AC: The Guatemalan Civil War involved systemic violence against Mayan communities, what historians have called genocide. Even the Birds doesn’t shy away from that weight. How do you write about atrocity without flattening it or making it spectacular?
RT: I believe that as I wrote I tried to focus on the specifics, the concrete, and on the people, their responses, but overall, my approach is probably that less is more in scenes that are, really, too much to bear. I was very aware of not wanting to traumatize the reader. I’ve read things that were traumatizing, that practically knocked me out for a week (not triggering—they weren’t things I had experienced) and I don’t agree with that approach to fiction. Fiction is not reality. We may get a sense of or empathize with what people go through when we read, but it’s not the same as going though it yourself.
AC: You spent a decade as a journalist in Guatemala. What are the things that you collected as a journalist that can’t be published? Was your book partly an answer to that?
RT: I was principally a news reporter, so most of my pieces were short, starting with a hard lede (the crux of the piece), followed by one or two opinions or responses in quotation marks, and ending with a paragraph or so of context. It’s a formula for conveying information quickly—deciding on the lede usually took the most time. Occasionally I wrote features, providing broader overviews of a subject or issue—over time or across political, social and economic domains—and analysis. Fiction, in my view, is broader yet, and deeper, able to reach into so many nooks and crannies of human life and of the world. So among the things I collected that weren’t published as journalism are many sights, sounds, smells, and tastes; weather, landscape, atmosphere, mood; the ripple effect of each “news” event; relationships breaking down and renewing; some of the questions people were asking themselves about the last three decades and where things should or could go next; the layers of guilt, blame, anger, sorrow, disillusionment, courage, hope, fear, perseverance; the wide range of perspectives and motivations. It was all there, around me all the time, in my work life and my home life. The questions other people asked were also the questions I asked. So that’s what I wrote about when I turned to fiction.
AC: You've won both the Penguin Random House Canada Student Award for Fiction and, for this novel, the Guernica Prize. What did it feel like to have the manuscript recognized before it was even out in the world? Did the Guernica Prize change your relationship to the book at all?
RT: I was overjoyed by both prizes—the Guernica Prize, in particular, felt validating after years of rejection. A novel is an investment of many, many years without knowing whether anybody will ever want to read it. So to receive a prize before the novel is published is reassuring, it makes the whole process a little less scary. I don’t think I can say the prize changed my relationship to the book (although I think the cover design had me falling in love with the story again), but it certainly changed my relationship to the writing community. I felt like I had finally arrived, or stepped through some portal into the world of writers who have actually published. It was a good feeling. I’ve been enjoying meeting, cheering for, listening to other authors in these months before the book is published. I don’t know why I wasn’t doing more of that before—I probably should have been. But the prize opened up opportunities and motivated me to dive into a community that I’d felt on the fringes of. I’m grateful for that.
AC: What are you working on now?
RT: I’ve turned back to writing short stories for a bit—a kind of reset or back to the basics (though there is nothing basic about a short story, it’s just shorter). But I also have another novel project that I hope to get back to soon. This one is set in Southwestern Ontario, where I now live. Some of the themes are the same as those in Even the Birds (division, grief, relationships among women), but this time the setting is one where people with power seek to pave over (erase) the wounds caused by racism and sexism, to pretend they don’t exist, to deny there is anything wrong. The first chapter of this novel (tentatively titled Duck/Rabbit) won the Penguin Random House Canada Student Award for Fiction in 2024 and was published in the chapbook Three. Readers who want a taste can access it from my website (www.ruthtaylorwrites.ca).
AC: Thank you, Ruth, for this conversation. I’m sure the readers of Even the Birds will find themselves rooting for Isabel, Yasmin, and Soraida as they follow their journey through such a painful chapter in Guatemalan history.
About the author
Ruth Taylor worked as a journalist in Guatemala from 1994 to 2003, before returning to Canada and taking up fiction. Her short stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Dalhousie Review, Potomac Review, and This Magazine, among other journals. In 2024, she won the Penguin Random House Canada Student Award for Fiction and in 2025, the Guernica Prize for Literary Fiction. Even the Birds is her first novel. Ruth lives and writes in London, Ontario.
Author Picture Credit: Nicole DePodesta @kenickiephotography