Poets & Writers Theater

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.

In this 2016 video, Michael Chabon presents Toni Morrison with the Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contribution to the arts and American culture. Morrison, who received a lifetime achievement award from the PEN American Center, tells a packed audience about how she became a writer and the inspiration for her first novel, The Bluest Eye.

“It came to me one night as I was falling asleep / that I had finished with those amorous adventures / to which I had long been a slave.” In this video from the 2014 National Book Award finalists reading, Louise Glück reads her poem “An Adventure,” which appears in her National Book Award–winning collection Faithful and Virtuous Night (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).

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.

“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.

“Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names.” The life of Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Toni Morrison is remembered through this 2004 interview for CBS Sunday Morning highlighting what was most important to her: being a mother and a writer. Morrison died at the age of eighty-eight on August 5, 2019.

“Like literature, my own field, the Nobel Prize is an idea that, in times like these, helps us to think beyond our dividing walls...” In this video, Kazuo Ishiguro delivers a heartfelt speech to accept the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm.

“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.

"I play Haydn after a black day / and feel a simple warmth in my hands." In this video featuring Tomas Tranströmer's poem "Allegro," the Swedish poet and Nobel laureate plays piano in his home in Stockholm. Tranströmer passed away on March 26 at the age of eighty-three.

"Late August, given heavy rain and sun / For a full week, the blackberries would ripen." The late Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney reads his poem "Blackberry-Picking."