Anne Michaels, 66, is the author of five collections of poetry and three novels, including her debut, Fugitive Pieces, a post-Holocaust narrative cited as “a novel that goes to the heart of any disaster” when it won the Orange (now Women’s) prize in 1997. Her latest novel, Held, now out in paperback, is on the shortlist for this year’s Booker prize, whose winner is announced on 12 November. Praised by the New York Times as “a lyrical jigsaw of impressions and observations”, it moves between 1902 and 2025 in the company of a large cast of characters both fictitious and historical. Michaels spoke from Toronto, her birthplace, where she teaches creative writing.

How does a novel begin life for you?
With an image or a character for whom I feel an immediate compassion – like love at first sight, you know, when it then takes you 50 years to understand that person! I never imagine it’s going to be a short process.

So what was on your mind when you were writing Held?
Whether there is any consolation to be found in our mortality. Also: the very significant historical moment when science begins to displace our ancient relationship to what cannot be seen. The book argues there’s a value to that relationship – a value to what cannot be proven.

At what point did you alight on the book’s fragmentary structure?
I knew instantly that it was going to be told in various moments – I didn’t know how they were connected, but I knew that they were, and that it was going to take me a long time to understand how.

What led you to the style, both vivid and vague at once? I’m thinking, for example, of the startling glimpses of life in unspecified war zones during a segment set in the 1980s, or the way the novel introduces real-life figures to the action so subtly that we may wonder who is and isn’t invented.
I wanted the history to be under the surface. There’s a different measure for history that has to do with the agency of our inner lives: whether we turn our eyes a micrometre in one direction or another is crucial. And choosing what to be specific about or not to be specific about also has to do with wanting us to be jolted into really feeling an experience. You can use brutal language to describe brutality, but that’s a lie; language can’t represent brutality. It’s exactly the same when I’m trying to get at the most beautiful, profoundly intense experience of intimacy. Those moments may be indescribable but they’re ordinarily perceivable – we all know what they are. So I’m also trying to write in such a way that the reader has a place on the page.

This is your third novel; your first was published in 1996 and your second, The Winter Vault, came out in 2009.
A book, for me, takes as long as it takes. I think you only have one chance at a book and I’d rather write the book that needs to be written – and write fewer. It sometimes requires patience because I don’t know how to compromise. It’s hard to know there’s no shortcut; you can have your intellect aroused but wait years for connections to emerge. I console myself by saying, well, when you think of the writers you love, how many books do you mention? Two, three, four? So it’s all right to write fewer if I can reach the place I’m hoping to get to – but as a means to an economy, it’s not exactly something I’d recommend!

In a review of Fugitive Pieces, John Berger quoted Adorno’s famous remark that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” before concluding that, because of your novel, “finally, that statement is untrue”. What did you think when you saw that?
We were friends for decades, but at the time he wrote that review, we had not yet met. I was tremendously moved. We understood each other – deeply – and it meant a great deal that he said that. My relationship to that phrase of Adorno’s is that one could think of the silence at a funeral. In historical terms, that moment of silence could be years; how long it might be, and the distinction between silence and muteness, is something to think about. Muteness is cessation; silence isn’t. Silence is generative. Something happens in silence.

You’re currently on the shortlist for Canada’s Giller prize and the Prix Femina Étranger in France, as well as the Booker. How does it feel?
I never imagine that any of my novels will be understood – in the sense of being experienced – so it’s incredibly important to me; because the books take a long time, it’s storing up courage for what’s next.

When did you first feel that the stakes of writing were so high?
Part of me always had that conviction. Because Fugitive Pieces was my first novel, it was a tremendous testing of that resolve. We cannot speak on behalf of the dead, we cannot forgive on behalf of the dead, so how one writes about certain events carries tremendous responsibility. That responsibility to history, to the dead, to the core of what it means to be alive… I take it seriously. One never stops asking: from when do you begin to count the dead?

What’s Toronto like as a place to write?
I’ve lived here a long time and I have watched the literary culture of this city change dramatically. In the late 1940s, there were only 14 Canadian books published in Canada. A federal report in the early 50s said: “We’re supposed to be reporting on the state of our culture – we don’t have one!” From that moment, remarkably, there was a tremendous birth of culture across the board and an explosion of small presses in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Poets responded with most poignant alacrity, because [the idea that] there could be a community [of poets] across the country was something inconceivable!

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Tell us about the last book you gave as a gift.
I gave to a student a very slender book called Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au, because that’s a book where there’s hardly a breath on the surface of it – everything is in the depths – so, for this particular student, it was exactly the right thing.

Are you reading the other novels on the Booker shortlist?
Absolutely, out of solidarity.

Emil Ferris had a feeling she was a monster at an early age. “I was a werewolf,” she says, quite happily. “I had fangs and I was furry.”

Karen, the little werewolf girl at the heart of Ferris’s landmark graphic novel, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, is clearly inspired by that self-portrait. The character is drawn as an oh-so-cute creature who is vulnerable, optimistic and hirsute. Obsessed by her neighbour’s death, she embarks on an investigation that exposes the grand horrors of political history and the street-level drama of 1968 Chicago. Both strands are filtered through Karen and Ferris’s shared fascination with monstrousness. “The book is a refutation of the idea that the monster is bad,” the 62-year-old author says.

The first volume of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters was published to huge acclaim, winning numerous awards and vaulting the Chicago-based writer and illustrator into the highest pantheon of graphic storytellers. Seven years later, Book Two picks up precisely where the first left off. It’s been a long wait for fans to discover the second half of the story, partly because of Ferris’s choice to do “the most laborious thing in the whole world” – to draw with a pen, each page requiring “thousands of tiny marks”.

Though time-consuming, Ferris says each page she creates is “made with joy and thanks”. She is especially grateful to be able to do the work she does, having previously been paralysed in three limbs after contracting West Nile virus in 2001. At the time, it didn’t seem it would be possible to return to her work as a freelance illustrator and a toy designer, so after recovering some mobility she returned to education. Her aim was to train as a digital animator, “but I found out I was totally crap at that”, she says. When she discovered graphic novels, through Art Spiegelman’s Maus, she “put all the energy [she’d] been using to walk into learning to draw again.” She needed all the help she could get: her six-year-old daughter duct-taped a pen into her hand, while a friend sent money for food. “I was so fortunate,” she says. “I had the grace and kindness of so many people to help get this book out into the world.”

Ferris’s faith in humanity is embedded in every page of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. Karen grows up in a world of prejudice offset by compassion. It’s a Dickensian gallery of mobsters, sex workers and artists, that the author both recognises and rehabilitates. A repeated theme of the work is the power of art to change the world on a personal and political level. Ferris is inspired by her father, an artist, who was “a tough guy, a guy involved in dark forces in his youth, a bit of a mobster. But who found art and was accepted by that world. And it changed his life.”

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For Ferris, there are “good monsters” and “bad monsters”. The good are emblems of individuality, best represented in the book by Karen’s emerging queerness and her brother’s alloy of street smarts and artistic sensitivity. Bad monsters are the “mediocre villagers with pitchforks”, those “always looking to chase that thing within themselves that they’ve lost. That beautiful wild thing that lives in the forest.”

It is not always easy to tell whether Ferris is being mystical or metaphorical. One thing she is clear on, however, is that there are real threats facing art and humanity. “I look at my daughter’s generation and I see them interacting with this small lighted box. My God, I’m terrified for a future experienced through this narrowed vista,” she says. So far, so familiar. But Ferris’s worries are more specific than the usual laments for the pre-digital age. Transhumanism is one of her concerns, CRISPR gene-editing another – “which will force us to reconsider our relationship with Mary Shelley … the genius of our age”.

The core of her anxiety seems laser-focused on a future devoid of individuality and “our glorious human difference”. It’s writ large in the Nazi camps that make up the gruelling focal flashback of Book Two, and duplicated in miniature by Karen’s schoolyard bullies. Ferris does not dilute the horror of either, complete with a sexual threat, which is “one of the many things about the concentration camps that are never really mentioned”.

Social conformity looms as the ultimate “monster” that My Favourite Thing is Monsters is trying to warn against. The book is “about a single individual discovering their inner forces. The inner forces that terrify them and the inner forces that so intrigue them and could potentially heal them,” Ferris says.

Is art that inner force, I ask? She nods enthusiastically. “It’s our heritage and our birthright and we must have it,” she says. “Because we can’t enter a future without our humanity. There’s no point to it.”

• My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two by Emil Ferris is published Fantagraphics (£44.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.