The United States abolished the slave trade -- not domestic slavery -- 200 years ago, a year after Great Britain did.

The anniversary inspired a successful blend of fact and fiction with American and British writers of two honored books at a symposium last Wednesday at the University of Pittsburgh.

The authors were novelist Barry Unsworth, whose superb "Sacred Hunger" illuminated the involvement of the English in the slave trade of the 1700s, and Marcus Rediker, whose new history, "The Slave Ship," brought home the horrors of that particular institution as a tool of capitalism.

Both are prize winners. Unsworth shared the 1992 Booker Prize with Michael Ondaatje ("The English Patient"). Rediker, who teaches history at Pitt, is winner of the top book award from the Organization of American Historians this year.

Unsworth's novel set Rediker on his road to study the system that made slavery work.

"When you write a book, it pays to read the great ones," he said at the session, adding that his book contains a citation from "Sacred Hunger."

Rediker traveled to Liverpool, once home to English slavers, in 2005 to meet Unsworth at a literary festival. The relationship led to the English writer's trip here.

The 77-year-old Unsworth lives in Umbria, Italy, where he has continued to write historical fiction. Four novels have followed "Sacred Hunger" -- "Morality Play" (1995), his biggest seller, about traveling medieval players; "After Hannibal" (1996), set in Umbria; "Losing Nelson" (1999), a complex examination of hero worship inspired by the famous admiral; and "A Ruby in Her Navel" (2006), life in Sicily following the Second Crusade.

"Writing a novel follows the shape of a parabola," Unsworth said. "The novelist starts in ignorance, rises to a kind of knowledge about the subject but ends up back where he started."

While admitting that his research isn't as thorough as Rediker's ("because it doesn't have to be"), the novelist said the characters and incidents in "Sacred Hunger" are based on reality.

He began the novel while living in Liverpool "where the evidence of the slave trade is still everywhere. Without the evidence of this horrible trade in slaves, I could not write the book.

"But, the problem of the novelist is conveying this information in a natural way," Unsworth said.

"And the problem of a historian is that we can't write as well as the novelist," Rediker countered.

Moderated by Pitt historian Reid Andrews, the dialogue between fiction and reality was one of those rare conjunctions of the two literary genres. In order to capture effectively their subject, both writers plunged into the dark world of slavery, and both said they emerged changed.

"The experience of living with these horrors every day is a transforming one," said Rediker as Unsworth nodded his head in agreement.

Both agreed that the method of conducting the sale and delivery of human souls depended on a form of terrorism.

"It was an instrument to control the cargo," Rediker said, as well as the fuel to start and sustain racism in the Western world.

During a talk with both men later, the conversation focused on the writing of history and how it provides the fodder for the novelist.

Unsworth's new novel, "Land of Marvels," to be published in January, begins in Baghdad in 1914, when the territory was part of Turkey's Ottoman Empire and still known as Mesopotamia.

The time and place gave the novelist tools to reflect and comment on today's Iraq and its subjugation to a Western power, the United States. The British, under the urging of Winston Churchill, then in charge of the navy, sought to control the oil concessions in the Middle East while the Turks pushed control of the region through a railroad link.

"Yes, it's about the present, certainly, but also about the destruction of the past," said Unsworth. In the new book, an archaeological discovery is threatened by the rail construction.

The story brought to mind the looting and devastation of Iraqi antiquities in the chaos that followed the U.S.'s ill-planned occupation of Baghdad.

In the second part of the symposium, the cultural and historical legacies of the slave trade were discussed by:

Jerome Branche, associate professor of Latin American and cultural studies in Pitt's Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures; Edda Fields-Black, associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University; Rebecca Shumway, assistant professor of history in Pitt's Department of History; and Stefan Wheelock, assistant professor of English in Pitt's Department of English.