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“The only counsel that is acceptable is to work! To work very hard until you discover the kind of writer that you want to be.” Nobel Prize–winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa dispenses advice to emerging writers in this Louisiana Channel interview with Christian Lund. Vargas Llosa died at the age of eighty-nine on April 13, 2025.
In this Louisiana Channel interview, Mohsin Hamid talks about how his writing process has changed over the years with each novel he’s written, the importance of form and structure to a reader’s understanding of narrative, and the responsibility of writers to establish and shape reality. “We talk about reality as though it is real, but we are aware that we are creating it,” he says.
In this 2023 Louisiana Channel interview, acclaimed British author Tessa Hadley offers her “wicked” advice to writers and talks about how she learned to “write truthfully” in the process of writing her first novel, Accidents in the Home (Henry Holt, 2002).
“I’m not consciously balancing humor and tragedy, but I know that they do exist side by side.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Lorrie Moore talks about the nature of jokes, the emotional and tonal range of her short stories, and reflects on the sense of repetition in her novel I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home (Knopf, 2023).
In this 2022 Louisiana Channel interview, Japanese novelist Sayaka Murata talks about the imaginary worlds of her childhoood, her writing process involving character sketches, and the origin of her otherworldly stories. “My world of daydreams or the power of stories saved me, so I was able to survive. And this same strength is in my protagonists,” says Murata.
“Your mind wants to move, and the best thing a work of art can do is take your mind with it, moving somewhere you never expected to move.” Anne Carson talks about the artists and philosophers who inspire her to create and think, and how boxing has helped her in the wake of her recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in a conversation with Norwegian author Linn Ullmann for this Louisiana Channel event.
In this Louisiana Channel video, Russian poet and journalist Maria Stepanova offers her advice for young writers to look forward to something unknown and to be able to “look into the future with some degree of hope.”
In this 2014 Louisiana Channel interview from his home in Brooklyn, Paul Auster talks about how a chance meeting with legendary baseball player Willie Mays led him to become a writer and what he has learned about writing. “The essence of being an artist is to confront the things you’re trying to do, to tackle it head on, and if it’s good, it will have its own beauty.” Auster died at the age of seventy-seven on April 30, 2024.
“Science fiction is a reminder that not everyone had access to their history,” says Norwegian artist Sandra Mujinga who draws on science fiction in her artistic practice, which includes installation and video art, for this Louisiana Channel interview. “It’s so important to keep imagining other realities,” says Mujinga.
“Memory is my instrument and my element, my material,” says French Nobel Prize–winning author Annie Ernaux in this Louisiana Channel interview with Matthias Dressler-Bredsdorff in Copenhagen. “I’m nobody when I write. I search. When I write, I know I have a woman’s experience.”
