“Stories were so important in the world, and I wanted to make up some of these stories.” The 2013 Nobel Lecture in Literature this year is replaced by a pre-recorded video conversation with Alice Munro, Nobel Laureate in Literature.
Read more...
In this segment of The Writer’s Block, the acclaimed Egyptian author and journalist Hamdy El-Gazzar discusses writing poetry, incorporating sex as a theme in his work, and the importance of letting the spirit of a text live in translation. El-Gazzar is also Sampsonia Way‘s Egypt columnist.
Read more...
Writer Israel Centeno’s ‘search to ascribe a tangible meaning to the oblique feeling that goes above and beyond simple nostalgia’ has led him to a close reading of Fernando Pessoa’s works and the stories of Venezuelan writer Enza García Arreaza.
Read more...
The Nobel Laureate and British writer Doris Lessing, who died last week at age 94, authored 54 works, including the seminal piece The Golden Notebook. We look back at Lessing’s life with two clips: a fascinating Bill Moyers interview and a video of Lessing discussing her experiences as a writer.
Read more...
Continuing with his discussion on exile, writer Israel Centeno offers an examination of the word “hiraeth” – “that unattainable yearning felt for a person, figure, or even nation that probably never existed” – and a reading of Black Sand, a novel by Venezuelan author Juan Carlos Méndez Guedéz.
Read more...
A discussion on craft with acclaimed Native American poet and musician Joy Harjo widens to include stories about her family and ancestors, writers’ block, the forced exile of Native Americans in the US, and what it takes to balance her “two lovers,” music and poetry.
Read more...
In this interview, Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka talks about his most celebrated characters and plays and how one character was inspired by his “Wild Christian” mother and another by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.
Read more...
