Episodes
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In his most famous book “The Membranes”, the Taiwanese writer and scholar Chi Ta-wei imagines a future where humans live underwater, gender is more fluid, and mega-companies use artificial intelligence to fight wars.
Published in 1995 almost 30 years has passed. The world has changed since then. His own life has changed. In this interview he express the wish to write a sequel to “The Membranes” that could capture how the world has changed in the meantime, and simultaneously answer the questions his book still leaves him with today.
Join us, when we talk about being distanced from mainstream society, how the pandemic changed his view on writing career, on gay rights in the 90’s Taiwan, the science fiction genre, learning new lessions about his own books, about loneliness, manga and the courage to write. -
Will our past come back to haunt us? Do we all share the same age-old collective traumas, and how can literature, and especially the horror-genre, help us process them?
These are some of the questions I ask the guest of todays episode — Mariana Enriquez. From Buenos Aires, Argentina, she is a worldknown novelist, short story writer and journalist. She published her first work already when she was only 21 years old, and has since then won several important literary awards, amongst others the prestigious spanish Herralde Prize. In the non-spanish speaking world she is mostly know for her two collection of short stories, namely “The dangers of smoking in bed” and “The things we lost in the fire”, besides most recent novel, “Our share of night”.
Her stories consists of a unique and uncanny mix of violence, social injustice, ghosts, feminism, additions, sex, local myths and world history. And whether they portray a supernatural or realistic univers, they are all equally unsettling to read, mostly because she insists at staring directly at the horror, the evil.
In this talk I ask her about how she gained her literary voice, why she choose horror as her preferred genre; how the former dictatorship in Argentina influenced both her childhood and her writing; why desire is fundamentally toxic; about writing sex, psycho-geography and transgenerational trauma. -
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For the Brooklyn-born Italian writer, Claudia Durastanti, identity never seems fixed. We might repeat to ourselves the story of who we are, how we came to be us, and how we fit into this world, but ultimately it remains fiction.
Her most recent book from 2019, La Straniera (Strangers I Know), opens with two versions of how her parents meet each other: While her mother claimed she saved her father from jumping into Tiber River in Rome, her father insists it happened when he saved her from an attempted robbery at the train station.
From this point of departure the book takes on many shapes, themes, stories and formats: Talking with her before her participation in Louisiana Literature, Durastanti speak about why her deaf parents don't like fiction; on the “failed” chapters that were not included in the book; why autobiographies are not always to be trusted; of geography as destiny and translation as the story of poetic mistakes — All in all a wild and beautiful meditation on storytelling, irony, mythologies, family history, language and identity. -
“It’s been four to five years that I cannot write. My mind is empty. All things about Iran I have written. But I didn’t touch the life of the Americans. But I am in the United States. It’s difficult to be in another world, and write about an another world… I also wrote a lot. But I think it’s enough. It’s enough. I wrote all the things I knew.”
This is the Iranian writer, Shahrnush Parsipur, speaking of the potential end of her writing life. Born in 1946, she has been writing since the late 1960s. Although her early works enjoyed popularity during the time of the Shah, it became increasingly harder for her to write after The Iranian Revolution of 1979: Her books were banned, changed, and she herself spent almost five years in prison on four separate occasions, at least one of them because of the book “Women Without Men”, who was accused for being anti-islam.
In 1994 she emigrated to California, where she has been living ever since. This distance from Iran and her readers had a very determining effect on her writing career.
Interviewing her in the danish city of Aarhus, where she has been invited to talk about her works, I feel curious how it is to be a writer, whose books are mostly banned in the country that reads them; whose books are distributed in Iran mainly in the black marked; whose masterpieces are admired and read all over the world, but not recognized in the country they take place; how it is to be a writer exiled from the universe of her literature. -
In her latest book, “Pink Slime”, the Uruguayan author Fernanda Trías foresaw that a global pandemic would change the world. Building on a mix of nightmares, a concern for climate change and intuition, she constructed a claustrophobic reality for her characters to test themselves in.
Only by pushing her characters to extremes, she explains, do they reveal their own personalities and motives. Only then do we learn about theirs fears, values and dreams. An intuitive writer like herself can spend a whole novel trying to understand why her narrator stays in the epidemic city that everybody else is fleeing from.
In both “Pink Slime” and her first novel “The Rooftop” from 2001, she explores the interconnectedness of fear and love, which sometimes leads to us doing destructive things in the name of love. I ask why these "ugly feelings" continues to appeal to her.
From here, we to talk about the relationship between mothers and children; why both writing and reading literature is always a political act; and how is was for her to be a female writer from Uruguay slowly entering the international literature scene. -
Senegalese writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr took the literary world by storm with the publication of his fourth novel, “The Most Secret Memory of Men” from 2021, which won the french Prix Concourt of that same year.
It is the thrilling story of the young senegalese writer Diégane who gets his hand on an old book from the 1930s called “The Labyrint of the Inhuman”, written by the long forgotten senegalese writer T. C. Elimane. The book changes his view not only on himself and what literature can be, but makes him obsessed about learning more about the mysterious author. A search that transports him from Paris to Amsterdam, via stories to South America, before he ends up home in Senegal.
Why the violent obsession?
In many ways Elimanes story mirrors Diégane own life, being a writer from Senegal living in Paris, who is being read and judged by a french literary community. His search makes him reflect on what it means to be an african writer in Europe, on who has the right to write about what, and on the complicated history of colonialism whose power dynamics still influences literature today.
“The whole literary history is one big playful plundering”, says Diégane in the book, anticipating this talk with Sarr, where we to him about plagiarism; about Léopold Sédar Senghor, the poet who became the first president of Senegal; about Bulgakov, Borges and Bolaño; Sarrs own sources of inspiration; and whether or not poems are still helpfull when trying to seduce a romantic partner. -
With more than a million copies sold and winning the 2020 Goncourt prize, french writer Hervé le Tellier experienced a late rise to fame in the literary world with his most recent novel, The Anomaly.
The book itself contains multiple books of different genres inside, and in some way already foresaw it’s own succes. We talk about his own relationship to fame, the potential danger of succes in light of the imposter syndrome and how he came up with the idea of L’Anomalie.
I love to write sentences I don’t like myself, says Hervé, before turning to what is important to him when writing a character, especially when based on himself.
Since 2019 Le Tellier has been the president of the influential literary group, Oulipo, which historic member counts George Perec, Italo Calvino and Raymond Queneau amongst others. I ask how their way of using constraint is still relevant today, how they continue to work as a group, and what inspired him most throughout his career.
