In search of an Author

Chi Ta-Wei: On books that keeps teaching us new things

In his most famous book “The Membranes”, the Taiwanese writer and scholar Chi Ta-wei imagines a future where humans live underwater, gender is more fluid, and mega-companies use artificial intelligence to fight wars. Published in 1995 almost 30 years has passed. The world has changed since then. His own life has changed. In this interview he express the wish to write a sequel to “The Membranes” that could capture how the world has changed in the meantime, and simultaneously answer the questions ...

Mariana Enriquez: On writing our deepest fears

Will our past come back to haunt us? Do we all share the same age-old collective traumas, and how can literature, and especially the horror-genre, help us process them? These are some of the questions I ask the guest of todays episode — Mariana Enriquez. From Buenos Aires, Argentina, she is a worldknown novelist, short story writer and journalist. She published her first work already when she was only 21 years old, and has since then won several important literary awards, amongst others the pres...

Claudia Durastanti: On the fictitiousness of the stories we tell ourselves

For the Brooklyn-born Italian writer, Claudia Durastanti, identity never seems fixed. We might repeat to ourselves the story of who we are, how we came to be us, and how we fit into this world, but ultimately it remains fiction. Her most recent book from 2019, La Straniera (Strangers I Know), opens with two versions of how her parents meet each other: While her mother claimed she saved her father from jumping into Tiber River in Rome, her father insists it happened when he saved her from an atte...

Shahrnūsh Pārsīʹpūr: On being distanced from the place and people of your books

“It’s been four to five years that I cannot write. My mind is empty. All things about Iran I have written. But I didn’t touch the life of the Americans. But I am in the United States. It’s difficult to be in another world, and write about an another world… I also wrote a lot. But I think it’s enough. It’s enough. I wrote all the things I knew.” This is the Iranian writer, Shahrnush Parsipur, speaking of the potential end of her writing life. Born in 1946, she has been writing since the late 1960...

Fernanda Trías: On pushing your characters off a cliff

In her latest book, “Pink Slime”, the Uruguayan author Fernanda Trías foresaw that a global pandemic would change the world. Building on a mix of nightmares, a concern for climate change and intuition, she constructed a claustrophobic reality for her characters to test themselves in. Only by pushing her characters to extremes, she explains, do they reveal their own personalities and motives. Only then do we learn about theirs fears, values and dreams. An intuitive writer like herself can spend a...

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr: On the power dynamics surrounding literature

Senegalese writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr took the literary world by storm with the publication of his fourth novel, “The Most Secret Memory of Men” from 2021, which won the french Prix Concourt of that same year. It is the thrilling story of the young senegalese writer Diégane who gets his hand on an old book from the 1930s called “The Labyrint of the Inhuman”, written by the long forgotten senegalese writer T. C. Elimane. The book changes his view not only on himself and what literature can be, b...

Hervé le Tellier: On the potential of constraint and of being a bitch to yourself

With more than a million copies sold and winning the 2020 Goncourt prize, french writer Hervé le Tellier experienced a late rise to fame in the literary world with his most recent novel, The Anomaly. The book itself contains multiple books of different genres inside, and in some way already foresaw it’s own succes. We talk about his own relationship to fame, the potential danger of succes in light of the imposter syndrome and how he came up with the idea of L’Anomalie. I love to write sentences ...

Do you sometimes feel like a character in need of a role?