Poets & Writers Theater

“The moment kids start to lie is the moment storytelling begins.” Young-Ha Kim delivers a TEDx Talk about all children beginning as artists, novel writing as a process of composing one sentence after another, and the value of a world in which everyone creates art, whether in public or in private. Kim’s story collection Diary of a Murderer (Mariner Books, 2019), translated from the Korean by Krys Lee, is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Based on real events, Women Talking is the story of eight women in a remote Mennonite colony who face an agonizing decision in the aftermath of a series of unspeakable sexual crimes.” This book trailer introduces Miriam Toews’s seventh novel, Women Talking (Bloomsbury, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“When I was writing, I was trying hard not to sensationalize it,” Claire Adam says of Trinidad, where she grew up and set her debut novel, Golden Child (SJP for Hogarth, 2019). On Late Night With Seth Meyers, Adam also talks about the important role education played in her life and why she wouldn’t let her siblings read the book until it was completed.

“Manuscript drafts and maps in Tolkien’s own hand show how the characters and the narrative developed,” says John McQuillen, associate curator at the Morgan Library & Museum, about the “Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth” exhibit. This is the largest collection ever assembled of J. R. R. Tolkien’s original manuscripts, drawings, and illustrated maps, which inspired and were created alongside many of his most famous works.

“I’ve always wanted to meet Stephen King—he’s like the author of all my nightmares.” In this video, Kristen Roupenian reveals some of her favorite things, dreams, secrets, and excuses. Her debut short story collection, You Know You Want This (Gallery/Scout Press, 2019), includes “Cat Person,” which was published by the New Yorker in 2017 and went viral on the Internet.

His Dark Materials is a television series adaptation of Philip Pullman’s award-winning fantasy adventure trilogy of the same name, comprising of the novels The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. Directed by Tom Hooper, the series stars Tyler Howitt, Dafne Keen, James McAvoy, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Ruth Wilson, and follows the coming-of-age story of two children discovering their identities and destinies while journeying through parallel universes.

“I was thinking about a whole load of names, the likes of Hamsun, Dostoevsky, Kafka...authors whose writing would be completely unfamiliar to us if it weren’t for the transformative, transcendental power of translation.” Martin Aitken—who has translated numerous Scandinavian authors including Helle Helle, Josefine Klougart, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Dorthe Nors—accepts the 2019 PEN Translation Prize for his translation from the Norwegian of Hanne Ørstavik’s novel Love (Archipelago Books, 2018).

“What are the ethics around documenting political crises? How much do you become a parasite of people’s suffering? What good do you do to a situation by documenting it or fictionalizing it? These are all questions that are in the novel.” Valeria Luiselli discusses the unique challenges of writing about the ongoing migrant crisis at the U.S. southern border in her most recent novel, Lost Children Archive (Knopf, 2019), with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown. An interview with Luiselli by Lauren LeBlanc appears in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“We have found books that have challenged our notions of what fiction is and how to imagine the world,” says Elnathan John, one of five judges on the panel for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, about the thirteen novels in contention for the prize. The list includes Celestial Bodies (Sandstone Press, 2018) by Jokha Alharthi, translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth, and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018) by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

“It’s important to be a reader because it can help make you a better person.” Anissa Gray, author of The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls (Berkley, 2019), talks about the importance of reading, offers advice to aspiring writers, and explains why she does not loan out books in this interview for Penguin Random House.

“I was very lucky to have family members who are all very outgoing and love to hear people talk about them.” On Late Night With Seth Meyers, Ingrid Rojas Contreras talks about how her family and childhood in Colombia inspired her first novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree (Doubleday, 2018).

Washington Post book critic Ron Charles takes a humorous look at Helen Oyeyemi’s sixth novel, Gingerbread (Riverhead Books, 2019), for his Totally Hip Video Book Review series. Oyeyemi answers questions about her new novel in a recent installment of our online series Ten Questions.

Argentinean author Mariana Enriquez and Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel discuss their shared passion for dark and sordid aesthetics, writing about the body, blurred realities, and writers including Charles Baudelaire, Mircea Cărtărescu, and Philip Roth. Enriquez is the author of Things We Lost in the Fire (Hogarth, 2017), translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, and Nettel is the author of After the Winter (Coffee House Press, 2018), translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey.

“I would read out loud and tried to check in my own breath, in my own body how the sentence was feeling and what kind of experience it was giving me as the first reader.” Marci Vogel reads from her books At the Border of Wilshire & Nobody (Howling Bird Press, 2015) and Death and Other Holidays (Melville House, 2018) and discusses her writing process both with poetry and prose in this Poetry.LA interview with Mariano Zaro.

“She wasn’t sure if we were real, but nothing about us felt false.” Akwaeke Emezi, a 2018 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree nominated by Carmen Maria Machado, reads from their debut novel, Freshwater (Grove Press, 2018). The novel has been longlisted for the 2019 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

“Inside a novel, one has the opportunity to experience the ambiguous reality of a whole other consciousness. When you read, you are possessed by the voice of another.” In this 2017 Louisiana Channel interview, Siri Hustvedt talks about the transformative experience of reading novels. Hustvedt’s seventh novel, Memories of the Future (Simon & Schuster, 2019), is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Native Son, Richard Wright’s 1940 novel about a young African American man living in poverty in Chicago, has been adapted into a feature film for the third time. The movie is directed by visual artist Rashid Johnson, with a screenplay by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, and stars Sanaa Lathan, KiKi Layne, Elizabeth Marvel, Margaret Qualley, Nick Robinson, and Ashton Sanders.
 

Tom Shankland has directed a new television series adaptation of Les Misérables, Victor Hugo’s classic 1862 historical fiction novel, for Masterpiece on PBS. The cast of characters includes a young working woman Fantine, her daughter Cosette, and police inspector Javert, who chases after fugitive Jean Valjean. Ellie Bamber, Lilly Collins, David Oyelowo, and Dominic West star in the lead roles.

Khaled Khalifa talks with Renée Ragin at Duke University about questions of Arab and Syrian identity, the relationship between his writing and war, and themes of death and difficult journeys in his fifth novel, Death Is Hard Work (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). The novel, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“In a lot of African storytelling, unlike storytelling in the West, it’s the trickster who is telling the story, so you already know you can’t quite believe it.” On Late Night With Seth Meyers, Marlon James speaks about the influences behind his new novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Riverhead Books, 2019), the first title of his Dark Star Trilogy, ranging from the television series The Affair and George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. A profile of James by Kima Jones appears in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.