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FiveBooks Interviews
Co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, Hans Ulrich Obrist, says that to be contemporary means to come back to a present where we have never been. The one who belongs to his or her own time is the one who does not coincide psychologically with it. It’s somehow because when we are not completely in sync with the time then maybe we are more apt to perceive, to actually catch or capture our own time.
Film director Mat Whitecross on how he started: ‘I used to make films with my friends when we were kids. My dad had bought me a video camera when I was about 14. They were pretty sloppy horror films and slapstick comedies. Lots of Monty Python influences.’
Amanda Craig is the author of six novels, including the recently published Hearts and Minds. Often compared to Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray and Balzac, she writes interlinked novels about modern life, which combine satire, social comedy, romance and serious issues such as immigration, creativity and murder. Formerly an award-winning journalist, she is currently children's books critic of The Times.
Simon Mawer published his first novel 21 years ago and has since written seven others and two works of non-fiction. He is a trained biologist and has lived and worked in Italy for the last 30 years. Perhaps these two facts bring a different slant to his approach to writing, which The Economist has described as having ‘an inquisitive and quite un-English interest in history and science’. Simon Mawer will be appearing at the Jewish Book Week in London next week (http://www.jewishbookweek.com).
Man’s man Matt Lynn has spent the last few years ghost-writing military thrillers that ‘sell by the truckload’. He has now created his own series of books using that experience as a background. ‘Every SAS guy you meet these days is off fighting in Iraq for one of the Private Military Corporations. And it struck me that a small PMC unit would make a great theme for a series of books tracking a group of hardened fighters as they make their way around the world.’
Rated by the British Library as among the top ten foreign poets currently based in London, Hasan-Zadeh is one of the most exciting voices in contemporary poetry. Her collection On Wings Over the Horizon, translated into English in 2002 by Richard McKane, drew comparisons with Anna Akhmatova and Maria Tsvetayeva.
Chris Moss lived in Buenos Aires from 1991 to 2001, where he worked as an arts writer for the Buenos Aires Herald. He is travel and books editor at Time Out magazine, has edited several books for Time Out Guides, and regularly contributes travel features to the Daily Telegraph and Condé Nast Traveller. He is a music writer, specialising in Latin American rhythms, and reviews and compiles world music CDs – especially tango. His book Patagonia: A Cultural History was published by Signal Books/OUP in July 2008 and he is now working on a book about tango, psychoanalysis, sex and steak.
Charlotte Higgins is the chief arts writer of The Guardian and the author of Latin Love Lessons: Put a Little Ovid in your Life and It’s All Greek to Me. She believes that the value of classics today is incalculable, and her FiveBooks choices clearly reveal her passion for all things Latin and Greek.
Aleksandar Hemon is a novelist, short-story writer and journalist, born in Bosnia. Visiting America as a tourist in 1992, he found himself stranded when his home city of Sarajevo came under siege. Hemon undertook a variety of jobs in America while learning English, in which language he soon after wrote his first book, The Question of Bruno. He was later awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant and is frequently compared to Nabokov and Conrad. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two daughters, and teaches creative writing at the Northwestern University.
Hillary Chute is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and her new book, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, comes out in October this year from Columbia UP. She is also associate editor of MetaMaus, a project by Art Spiegelman forthcoming from Pantheon in 2011.