Interview: Sophie Hardach, author

It's her first print interview. Normally, she's the one holding out the microphone, or at least she was until May last year when she stopped working as a foreign correspondent. She'd done that for seven years since leaving Edinburgh University, and it was her job that accidentally led her towards the subject of her novel, The Registrar's Manual for Detecting False Marriages.

There is indeed such a manual for French registrars, and when Hardach discovered its existence when working for Reuters in Paris, she wrote it up as a news story. But there was something about it that lingered in her imagination. How could registrars possibly tell which marriage was forced and which was not? How could they avoid making false accusations against couples whose marriage was perfectly consensual? What could possibly be on the registrars' checklist for something as intimate and personal as a marriage?

The more she thought about it, the more she realised that is was the perfect symbol for our multicultural age. Now all she had to do was to work backwards, to find the kind of person whose marriage a French registrar might gingerly want to look into. A Kurd, perhaps. Why a Kurd, I ask.

"Well, you know, because I'm German and growing up there…"

At this point, I have a confession to make. I didn't grow up as the child of diplomats or attend the French/German/American school, nor do I work as a translator or a Brussels bureaucrat, so the whole notion of somebody being able to speak my own language better than I do comes as a bit of a shock. No, not a shock. More of a magic trick, like someone reaching behind my ear and suddenly producing a gold sovereign.

So when it comes to asking Sophie Hardach "anything … anything at all" I forget some of the questions I'd meant to ask her about how she researched the life of Selim, her fictional Kurdish immigrant to Germany. The notion of asking something hard-edged about French integrationist policies dies on my lips.

Instead, I just blurt out the first thing which comes to mind, which is about as lame a question as I've ever asked anyone. "So how come you can speak English without a German accent?"

"Oh that," she says, dismissively (not just the perfect accent but true Brit self-deprecation too). "That's just hard work.When I was 13, I studied for a year at a girl's school in Dorset and that's an age when you pick up things very quickly."

But weren't there some girls there with anti-German attitudes? Did she get picked on? "There was a bit of that, but that was very helpful in making me lose my German accent very quickly. Things became so much easier once I could speak English without any accent."

And not just English. She also speaks fluent French, Italian, Spanish, German (naturally) and Italian.

"My publishers always say that I speak six languages. That's because I also studied Arabic, Japanese and Chinese at different points in my life, but I'm rubbish at them and so don't dare to count them individually. I lump them all together into a sixth language, if that makes any sense."

Though she worked in France for years and still keeps a flat in Paris, her Italian and her Spanish are better than her French. That, she says, is because she had a Colombian boyfriend while she was working in Bogota as an intern for a human rights organisation in the year before she went to Edinburgh to read politics and economics, and she's had an Italian boyfriend too, "so both my Spanish and Italian have a certain ease, which my French doesn't have. I have a British boyfriend, although maybe from a linguistic point of view, I should switch him for a French one. The Japanese have a saying that the best way to learn any language is on the pillow."

She smiles. As she's spent the last fortnight moving into a Highgate flat with her management consultant boyfriend, it's clear that she's only joking.

Hardach was born in 1979, the daughter of two university lecturers, and grew up in Marburg, a small town near Frankfurt which she insists is not the fictional German small town in which her registrar grows up and where Selim, her young Kurdish immigrant protagonist, finds temporary asylum. In a similar way, she emphasises, the registrar's manual in the novel is nothing like the real-life registrar's manual and the Kurdish Institute in Paris, which the registrar visits to find out more about Kurdish culture, is nothing like the Institut Kurde de Paris in which Hardach did her own assiduous researches for the novel.

Apart from the fact that, like the registrar, she is also a German who has lived and worked in Paris, the rest of the novel moves away from Hardach's own experience. After seven years of having to write news stories of studied neutrality, writing a novel proved "hugely liberating". "Yet at the same time, I can't switch off the journalist in me, so I had to ensure that the broader background is right.If you're writing about a people's suffering, you have the responsibility to do that."

So with Selim, whose marriage of convenience to a German girl turns into an extreme inconvenience for both, the wider picture is fully sketched in: the deadly hardships of being smuggled into Europe as a child, the grinding bureaucracy that gives him an uncertain future in his new homeland, and the gradual loss of contact with his homeland and the slow withering of a once-automatic faith in his teens and early adulthood.

All this, and the gradually encroaching shadow of terrorism, and the recurring debate over the extent to which immigrants should assimilate with the host culture, make Hardach's tale very much a novel of our times.

There might, she concedes, be something slightly controversial about a non-Kurdish journalist writing about Kurds. There might be, but I doubt it. Because anyone with Sophie Hardach's linguistic virtuosity not only learnt to slip past borders of prejudice long ago but now, as a novelist, shows how absurd they are in the first place.

• The Registrar's Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages by Sophie Hardach is published by Simon & Schuster, priced 12.99