Featured Interview With Gabriel Farago
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born in Budapest, and grew up in post-War Europe. After fleeing Hungary with my parents during the Revolution in 1956, I attended school in Austria before arriving in Australia as a teenager. Through my travels I have become multi-lingual and now feel ‘at home’ in different countries and diverse cultures. I hold degrees in literature and law, speak several languages and take my research and authenticity very seriously. Inquisitive by nature, I have studied Egyptology and learned to read the hieroglyphs. I travel extensively and visit all of the locations mentioned in my books. To create a seamless storyline, I try to weave fact and fiction together, blurring the boundaries between the two, so that the reader is never quite sure where one ends, and the other begins. This is of course quite deliberate as it creates the illusion of authenticity and reality in a work that is pure fiction. A successful work of fiction is a balancing act: reality must rub shoulders with imagination in a way that is both entertaining and plausible!
My home is now in the Blue Mountains in Australia, just outside Sydney, where we are surrounded by a World Heritage National Park. The beauty and solitude of this unique environment give me inspiration and the energy to weave my thoughts and ideas into stories which, I sincerely hope, will in turn entertain and inspire my readers.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
As a lawyer with a passion for history and archaeology, I had to wait many years before I could pursue another passion – writing – in earnest. However, my love of books and storytelling started long before that. I remember as a young boy reading biographies and history books with a torch under the bed covers, and then writing stories about archaeologists and explorers the next day, instead of doing homework. While I regularly got into trouble for this, I believe we can only do well in our endeavours if we are passionate about the things we love; for me, writing has become a passion.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Not surprisingly, I love reading thrillers. However, I have a degree in literature, and also like reading the classics, especially Russian, German and French classics by authors like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Pushkin, Goethe, Schiller, Thomas Mann and Günter Grass. French writers like Dumas, Flaubert and Balzac are favourites.
As for who inspires me in my writings, well, somehow all of them do. I draw on literature generally for inspiration and try to hone my craft by studying the work of many authors.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My latest book – The Hidden Genes of Professor K, a medical thriller – is book four in the Jack Rogan Mysteries series. It was inspired by the extraordinary research being carried out by scientists at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney where I am a director. Medical research is another serious interest of mine.
Writing The Hidden Genes of Professor K was an ambitious project. For a layman like me, exploring subjects touching on cutting-edge medical research and complex science is never easy, and would not have been possible without the guiding hand and generous help of leading experts. The learning curve was steep but very rewarding. It took me two years to write the book.
There has probably never been a more exciting time to be a research scientist than right now. Progress is breathtaking, the possibilities endless, breakthroughs come almost daily, and the speed of progress is head-spinning. Advances in technology are making the unthinkable possible, and what would once have taken two scientists several years of painstaking work, can now be done by a machine overnight!
I firmly believe that we are about to open a treasure-trove of knowledge buried in our genome right here, inside us all, that will transform the future of medicine and the journey of man.
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