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“I think that literature is really needed, and art in general. It’s saying something that cannot be said in any other way, and that’s why you do it.” In this interview, Norwegian author Jon Fosse, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023, talks about how music inspired him to write at a young age, and how pauses and silences are used to generate rhythm in his work.
In this 2013 video, Nobel laureate Alice Munro talks about her fascination with reading and writing at an early age in Canada’s countryside, how she can become “desperately consumed” with writing, and the ways in which her writing life changed throughout her long-standing career. Munro died at the age of ninety-two on May 13, 2024.
“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.”
Watch this 2018 reading and conversation with Nobel Prize–winning author Annie Ernaux celebrating the English publication of her book The Years, along with translator Alison L. Strayer and Seven Stories Press publisher Dan Simon at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, France.
In this Knopf video, Kazuo Ishiguro, who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, speaks about what he calls “double-cross metaphors” and how “tilting the reality of the world just a little bit” in his stories provides inspiration. For more Ishiguro, read “Never Let Me Go: A Profile of Kazuo Ishiguro” by John Freeman from the May/June 2005 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Writing has always been a pleasure. Even as a boy at school I looked forward to the class set aside for writing a story,” reads Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, from his lecture titled “Writing,” in which he discusses his earliest memories of reading and writing, as well as how his observations of colonization and immigration influenced his desire to write.
“There are a number of people my own age, who are doing extraordinary, remarkable work, but I feed more on the young—the sounds they are making are different, new.” In this 2012 interview for the Academy of Achievement, Nobel Prize–winning poet Louise Glück speaks on a variety of subjects, including falling in love with poetry, starting out as a writer, teaching, and her prolific career.
“You will love again the stranger who was your self.” Dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson reads Derek Walcott’s poem “Love After Love” from Collected Poems: 1948–1984 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986) for a tribute to the poet and playwright. Walcott, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, passed away on March 17, 2017.
“Many people aren’t even remotely interested in [poetry]. But it’s so clear to me that, of course, it’s what you want to do.” Louise Glück ruminates about her writing process in this short documentary from the Academy of American Poets. Glück has been named the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature.
“Anything will break given sufficient strain.” Nobel Prize–winning author William Golding speaks about the optimism that may often go unnoticed in his novel Lord of the Flies for this Faber & Faber video celebrating the sixty-fifth anniversary of the book.
