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“When you are comfortable with your own voice, you’re able to create other voices that are authentic as well.” In this short video, Derek Owusu, author most recently of Losing the Plot (Canongate Books, 2022) and one of Granta’s 2023 Best of Young British Novelists, talks about writing immigrant stories and finding your voice.
“A book can change your life, and I know because I had that happen to me.” Award-winning author Tobias Wolff talks about his childhood, education, writing life, and his novel Old School (Vintage, 2003) in this short film directed by Lawrence Bridges for the National Endowment for the Arts’ “Big Read” initiative. For more from Wolff, read this profile by Joe Woodward published in the March/April 2008 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Don’t worry about whether you’re writing anything, worry about if you’re sitting there attempting to write something or not.” In this video, Mohsin Hamid speaks to Granta about his award-winning fourth novel, Exit West (Riverhead Books, 2017), the job of being a writer, and what he has learned from Douglas Adams.
“It doesn’t interest me to know how a book will end, I have to discover that for myself.” In this video from the National Centre for Writing, Eimear McBride, who won the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction for her debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, speaks about how character and story and the process of discovery are the keys to her writing process.
“That’s the thing about writing. It’s about sitting with the problem.” In this Behind the Curtain video, screenwriter and director Greta Gerwig talks about adapting Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel Little Women into a film and the challenges of the writing process.
In this Books Are Magic event, Shastri Akella reads from his debut novel, The Sea Elephants (Flatiron Books, 2023), and speaks about his journey navigating the writing life with author Rakesh Satyal. Akella is featured in “First Fiction 2023” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this 2020 BookTube episode, David Sedaris speaks about his candid and confessional style of writing, his family life, and lessons learned with Joel Kim Booster, Cindy Pham, Jake Roper, and Francine Simone.
“I’m not convinced by myself as a writer,” says Adam Mars-Jones in this London Review Bookshop video about his slightly negative writing process and the origins of his memoir Kid Gloves: A Voyage Round My Father (Particular Books, 2015).
Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Charles Simic discusses his writing process of using various writing instruments—including envelopes, notebooks, and printed paper—in this brief interview for Poetry Breaks, a series created by Leita Luchetti in the 1980s and 1990s presented in partnership with the Academy of American Poets.
“He does the work. I do the cleanup, and we fight.” Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb is a documentary directed by Lizzie Gottlieb exploring the remarkable fifty-year relationship between Pulitzer Prize–winning author Robert Caro and his longtime editor Robert Gottlieb, and the art of editing.
