It was difficult. I was making the most complex work of my life: an installation of 450 porcelain vessels for a red aluminium shelf 50m above the entrance to the V&A. It had to be finished and installed on the scaffolding in the same month as the delivery of the final draft of The Hare With Amber Eyes, which follows an inherited collection of very small objects through 150 years of my Jewish family. Both projects had taken years.

My studio in Tulse Hill was tucked away behind chicken shops with a noisy garage next door. And every night I would be writing the last chapters about how close memoir feels to trespass, how to navigate what to say and what to leave unsaid, and trying to check notes on fin de siècle antisemitism or duelling codes in Paris or the weather in Odessa. We were firing the kilns every day. There were stacks of books among the glaze tests.

The kids were young and the research had been dogged and obsessional: returning to Paris and Vienna, to Tokyo to talk to my uncle Jiro, to Odessa with my brother Tom. Endless archives and streets and letters: I felt my fingers were ingrained with dust. The book felt like an installation: a series of walks through cities, encounters and echoes. When the scaffolding finally came down in the V&A I looked up and realised I’d been writing about a collection and making one at the same time.

I remember the relief after the book launch that I could return to making. And then the first letters started arriving. There were thousands. Suddenly everyone was a cousin, had lived round the corner, shared the pulse of recognition about a handed-on object, had nothing. I simply hadn’t registered that the condition of leaving a place, losing the thread of a family, was so universal. It was overwhelming.

The Hare With Amber Eyes changed my life. It was translated into 30 languages. I was on the road for a year afterwards. In some ways I still am.

A year ago we sold part of the netsuke collection to support the Refugee Council and donated our archives to the Jewish Museum in Vienna. In November an exhibition opened and cousins gathered from round the world, my father, aged 91, spoke in the Palais Ephrussi, his old family home. The law has changed to allow Holocaust-era families dual citizenship. I felt great pride. Books can change things, be generative.

And I still make pots in south London, still write. The great writer Jean Amery talked of the unfinished business of memory, “that nothing is resolved, nothing is settled”. I remain haunted by the family library that was looted in Vienna in 1938. With the catastrophe of the refugee crisis, the hardening of rhetoric, I wanted to make a work where the energy of exile, its polyphonic, plural nature could be celebrated. The Library of Exile started in Venice during the Biennale, moved to Dresden where it was installed in the Japanese Palace still bearing the scars of the destruction of 1945. And it will be at the British Museum for six months before leaving for its final destination in Mosul where it will become part of the university library, destroyed by Isis in 2015 and now being rebuilt. It holds more than 2,000 books written by those forced into exile. It spans 88 countries and dozens of languages. In every place there have been events with writers, workshops, storytelling for children, music. You reach down a book that matters to you and add your name to the bookplate. It feels like a real response to how reading affects us, how we pass things on.

• Edmund de Waal’s Library of Exile is at the British Museum from 12 March.