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In this video, V. S. Naipaul accepts the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature and reads his speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm. Described by the Swedish Academy as “a literary circumnavigator,” the prolific author published more than a dozen novels and several nonfiction books. Naipaul died at the age of eighty-five on August 11, 2018.
In this 2009 interview with poet Elizabeth Spires, former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall reads poems and speaks about the writing life. For more Hall, read “Turning Time Around: A Profile of Donald Hall” by contributor John Freeman from the November/December 2014 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. Hall passed away on June 23, 2018 at the age of eighty-nine.
In an interview with Web of Stories, poet and memoirist Donald Hall recounts his first meeting with T. S. Eliot. Hall is the author of the memoir A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), which is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
This independent documentary film directed by Oscar Corral explores Tom Wolfe’s writing life and his fourth novel, Back to Blood (Little, Brown, 2012), which is set in Miami and focuses on the subject of immigration. Wolfe died at the age of eighty-seven on May 14, 2018.
In this 2013 video, Lucie Brock-Broido reads her poem “You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World” from her collection Stay, Illusion (Knopf, 2013), which was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award in poetry. Brock-Broido died on March 6, 2018 at the age of sixty-one.
María Kodama discusses the work of her late husband, Jorge Luis Borges, at the Library of Congress, which Borges often called his home. Kodama is joined by Saúl Sosnowski, a professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at the University of Maryland.
At a public memorial at New York City’s Strand Book Store, family members, colleagues, and writers including Gay Talese, Fran Lebowitz, and Paul Krugman remember and honor Fred Bass, the bookstore’s longtime owner who died at the age of eighty-nine on January 3. The bookstore was founded by Bass’s father in 1927, and he began working there at the age of thirteen, taking over its management in 1956.
“I didn’t know I was being helpful to anybody. I was just telling a story I wanted to tell.” Ursula K. Le Guin talks about her Earthsea series and the unexpected connections she has made with her readers. Le Guin died on January 22, 2018 at the age of eighty-eight.
“Sing of disappointments more repeated than the batter of the sea....” At the Lannan Foundation in 1998, William Gass reads from his second novel, The Tunnel (Knopf, 1995), which took twenty-six years to write and earned him the 1996 American Book Award. Gass died on December 6, 2017 at the age of ninety-three.
“Poetry comes to me out of thin air or out of my unconscious mind. It’s sort of the way dreams come to us…” In this PBS NewsHour video, Jeffrey Brown revisits a conversation with John Ashbery from 2007 in which he speaks about his life as a poet and reads from his collection Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems (Ecco, 2007). Ashbery died on September 3, 2017 at the age of ninety.
