The Submission, your kaleidoscopic novel about post-9/11 life in New York was informed by your work for The New York Times in the wake of attacks. Please tell us about the experience of reporting on the aftermath of that awful morning.

I spent about six weeks in New York reporting on different aspects of the aftermath – a whole range of stories including ones about children who lost parents, families being notified of confirmed deaths, people sorting through the debris and “Portraits of Grief”. Then, after that, I went abroad to report – first from Afghanistan.

Although you contributed to the “Portraits of Grief” series – part of “A Nation Challenged”, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service – profiling each of the people that died at the World Trade Center, you said you didn’t look back at it while writing The Submission. Why?

As a novelist, I didn’t want to raid details of people’s lives for material. But also, as a reporter, I felt ambivalent about the “Portraits of Grief”. The wordcount left no room for complexity. The project made me ask, how do you avoid reducing the dead to thumbnail profiles? People are much more complicated than can be represented through daily journalism. They deserve to be portrayed and remembered in all their fullness.

What else made you decide to filter the experiences of 9/11 through fiction?

After the attacks, I was constantly shifting perspectives. Reporting from New York was a very intense experience and then suddenly I went overseas to Afghanistan and a lot of other Muslim countries. It was hard to relay competing perspective in an article. And as journalists we look for differences­ – differences between countries, cultures, classes and communities. We’re very sensitised to difference, but it’s much harder to write about similarities across countries, cultures, classes and communities. I felt that was something that could never be captured in non-fiction or in journalism.

Also, I was interested in exploring ambivalence through fiction. As a reporter you tend to seek coherence from your subject or your source – it all needs to add up and make sense. In truth, in reality, there’s often a great deal of murkiness and muddiness, confusion and contradiction.

I felt drawn to explore through fiction the different perspectives and deeper truths of the attack’s aftermath but, on the most literal level, the reason I decided to write the book was because the scenario just occurred to me in 2003. I was talking about the September 11 Memorial competition, which was ultimately won by Israeli-American Michael Arad, with an artist friend who mentioned that the backlash against the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington was partially fuelled by the fact that the designer, Maya Lin – who was selected through a blind competition – was an American of Asian descent. That got me thinking about what would ensue if there was an anonymous competition to design a memorial for 9/11 and the winner turned out to be an American Muslim. That’s how I got the idea, more than five years before the controversy over the construction of an Islamic community centre close to Ground Zero.

Now to the books of others. I read that, according to Bowker’s Books in Print database, more than 150 works of fiction and nearly 1,500 works of non-fiction have been written that draw their subject matter from 9/11. Of those, you’ve chosen three novels, a memoir and a collection of poetry.

I wanted this list to replicate the multiple perspectives of my novel – Marian Fontana’s memoir gives you a look at loss and attempted recovery; Galway Kinnell’s poems channel our collective horror and grief and place 9/11 in historical context; Harbor uses plot to make us rethink where the emotions of 9/11 led us; Hamid and Cole, both of whose narrators are, in some sense, outsiders, cast a complicating eye on 9/11’s implications. If you read all these works you’ll be pulled from one point of view to another.