Poets & Writers Theater

“I think each project requires its own form, and the story itself demands the form.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Lauren Groff talks about how her novel Matrix (Riverhead Books, 2021) began as a thought experiment around toxic masculinity, and reflects on the ways fiction can challenge patriarchal storytelling traditions.

“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.”

In this 2019 Louisiana Channel interview, Man Booker–winning author Han Kang speaks about the origins of her writing from her love of books to her questions about humanity. “When we are confronted by the horror of humanity, we have to question ourselves,” says Kang. Her new novel, Greek Lessons (Hogarth, 2023), translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won, is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Writing can be beautiful, witty, and entertaining but it’s a serious commitment.” In this 2019 Louisiana Literature interview, Anne Waldman shares her advice to aspiring writers with emphasis on the importance of reading widely and respecting the act of writing.

“I think of literature as a science that really cares about experiments, you can consider the wildest ideas, and you can play with theories that are wrong, that are delirious and insane.” Chilean novelist Benjamín Labatut, author of When We Cease to Understand the World (New York Review of Books, 2021), translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West, speaks with his Danish translator Peter Adolphsen for this Louisiana Channel interview.

“Literature is there to show us how there can be beauty in meaning, and this is what makes the literary experience so unique...and I’m hunting for this feeling all the time.” Hernan Diaz, author most recently of Trust (Riverhead Books, 2022), speaks about his relationship with reading, writing, and language in this Louisiana Channel interview with Marc-Christoph Wagner at the New York Public Library.

“What I like about teaching is that it is always an experiment in unfolding a new language of value that isn’t a dominant value of the day, that needs to be developed to stay human,” says Ben Lerner, author of The Hatred of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), about some of his approaches to mentoring and teaching poets in this interview with his Danish translator Tonny Vorm at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.

“When I write, I feel much larger than the limits of my body,” says Ocean Vuong, author of Time Is a Mother (Penguin Press, 2022), in this interview with his Danish translator Caspar Eric at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. “There is a mystery you tap into that is much bigger.”

“One of the necessary disciplines in my life has been to discipline myself not to fall into despair when I’m not writing,” says Geoff Dyer in this Louisiana Channel interview in which he discusses his writing process and how his new book, The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), came to be.

“My mother thought that if she taught me to read, I would become interested to read my books and leave her alone,” says Jamaica Kincaid about her experience reading as a child and how it influenced her as a writer in this interview from the 2021 Louisiana Literature Festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.

“I read so much, still, because I want to learn how to tell the perfect story.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Alex Schulman, author most recently of the novel The Survivors (Doubleday, 2021), speaks about the impact reading has had on his life, the power of storytelling, and how he started his writing career as a blogger.