Centre for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders in the Ancient and Modern Worlds. All errors are my own.
I am grateful to Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, which provided me with strong evidence to support my instincts about disasters. I learned about the notion of “elite panic” from her remarkable book.
Thank you to all the book clubs, libraries, literary festivals, producers, booksellers, and professors who have extended invitations over the years and have offered the opportunity to connect with readers and other writers. I am immensely grateful.
Profound love and thanks to my family, especially to my mother Joan Ainsworth, Pat and Norman Webster, and Vivienne and Larkin Webster. Much love and gratitude to all my Ainsworth and Webster family.
Wondrous thanks to Derek Webster. Words are everything, but sometimes they’re not enough.
AN INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR SALEEMA NAWAZ
This interview with author Saleema Nawaz was conducted on March 18, 2020. One week earlier, on March 11, the World Health Organization announced that the outbreak of COVID-19 could be characterized as a pandemic, and on March 13, the United States declared a national emergency, following similar announcements throughout Asia and Europe. Subsequently, several Canadian provinces also declared a state of emergency.
What inspired you to write this novel? What were some of the key questions you wanted to explore?
The idea began with characters I’d created for a few short stories I’d written and a plan I developed for bringing them together against the backdrop of a crisis that would test them in different ways.
Some of the thematic questions surfaced over the course of writing and editing the manuscript: What do we owe to ourselves and to one another—and does that change if the other person is a family member, a friend, or a stranger? How much do intentions matter if it is our actions in the world that have real effects on other people? And does a crisis bring out the worst in people, or the best?
Another practical issue I was exploring was what it would be like to live at a time when normal life was shifting to accommodate the new realities of an emerging pandemic. When would we start to let go of our regular routines, and how soon would a new normal take over? What would that feel like?
What kind of research did you do for the book, and what was the process of doing that research like? Were there any specific real-life epidemics that you used as models for the ARAMIS pandemic in your book?
I had the initial idea for the novel in late 2012, and I researched, wrote, and revised the manuscript between 2013 and 2019. I knew I had a certain amount of creative flexibility with a made-up illness, but I wanted ARAMIS, my fictional virus, to serve not only my own dramatic purposes, but also to conform to how diseases behave in reality and, ideally, to remain consistent throughout the book.
So I spent a lot of time on sites like PubMed and The Lancet, reading epidemiology papers and learning about agent-based modelling (computer simulations that can help us understand and predict complex human interactions, such as the spread of an infectious disease), generation time, and the basic reproductive number, as well as non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) methods like quarantine and contact tracing.
I read estimates of the disease burden on the U.S. of an avian flu pandemic, with and without different types of intervention strategies. I studied the CDC guidelines around community mitigation and read the emergency preparedness plans of many different cities in North America. I also read papers on the ethical and legal considerations of preparing for pandemics, given the limited supply of medical resources.
In particular, I spent time considering the kind of epidemic curve that could fit the five-month timeline I’d established and still remain plausible with the kind of social-distancing measures that have been put in place in different locations over the course of the novel.
To that end, I also studied the history of the Spanish Flu of 1918–1920, including disease modelling based on reported deaths in Europe as well as the city-by-city responses and outcomes across the United States. I read about genetic resistance to HIV and malaria, and ongoing research into genetic resistance to other diseases, such as Hepatitis C. I also read a lot about SARS, especially after I decided that the virus in the book would be a novel coronavirus, and I studied the public health literature that came out in the wake of that crisis. As outbreaks such