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FiveBooks Interviews
The author and former New York Times reporter finds real life more exciting than fiction. Who would ever go to a bookstore and say to the clerk: ‘Gee, today I’d really like to sink into a 500-page book on cancer clusters, dead children and irresponsible industry executives’? In the hands of a writer like Jonathan Harr, she says, the education is a treat.
The historian takes us from St Augustine to Milan Kundera in an attempt to pin down a fleeting spark of eternity in the present. He chooses five books on time as a philosophical concept and our tenuous understanding of the same.
Xinran is a Chinese writer, broadcaster and founder of The Mother’s Bridge of Love, an organisation reaching out to adopted Chinese children all over the world. She chooses five books on Chinese history and culture and says the birth of a donkey is more likely to be celebrated in rural China than that of a baby girl. Read this interview in English or Read this interview in Chinese.
Italian literary giant Dacia Maraini is the multi-awardwinning author of more than 50 books, including novels, plays, collections of poetry, and critical essays. Her works have been adapted for stage and screen, often directed by herself. Maraini founded the literary review Tempo di Letteratura and an all-women’s theatre group, Teatro della Maddalena. She was a key theorist and activist in the Italian feminist movement of the 1970s. She chooses magical Italian literature.
Maxim D Shrayer (www.shrayer.com) immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1987. A bilingual author and translator, Dr Shrayer is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College. His publications on Nabokov include The World of Nabokov’s Stories and Nabokov: Themes and Variations (in Russian). Shrayer has edited and co-translated two volumes of fiction by his father, David Shrayer-Petrov. In 2007 Shrayer received the National Jewish Book Award for An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature. Shrayer’s recent books are the literary memoir Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration and the collection of stories Yom Kippur in Amsterdam. He says a revisionist biography of Nabokov is due, one that comes to terms with the Jewish influence on his work.
Giles Swayne is a British composer, best known for his monumental choral pieces and his interest in African musical culture. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music under Harrison Birtwistle and at the Paris Conservatoire with Olivier Messiaen. In 1980 his choral work Cry, for 28 amplified voices, was premiered by the BBC Singers under John Poole. Hailed as a landmark, it has since been performed twice at the Proms and many times worldwide. In 1981, Swayne visited Senegal to record the music of the Jola people of Casamance. These recordings are now in the British Library. From 1990 to 1996 he lived in the Akuapem Hills in eastern Ghana. He now lives in London and is Composer-in-residence at Clare College, Cambridge. He is currently working on an open-ended series of bagatelles for piano, and a choral setting of a poem. ‘The thing about music, like the arts, is that there’s an extraordinary dichotomy between the art and the career,’ he says. ‘You can have people who are really extremely mediocre with huge careers, and you can have people who are wonderfully good, who explore their art in great depth, and actually don’t have wonderful careers. Bach was one of those.’
With a reputation as the godfather of screenwriting, UCLA’s Professor Richard Walter has mentored many of Hollywood’s most successful screenwriters. Walter is a member of the Writers Guild of America and is a writer of substantial professional experience throughout the media. He is the author of Escape From Film School and Screenwriting: The Art, Craft and Business of Film and Television Writing. He has written numerous feature assignments for the major studios and has sold material to all three networks. His latest book, Essentials of Screenwriting, is available from the end of June. Walter lectures on screenwriting throughout the world. He says Aristotle’s guidelines should be followed, not interpreted.
Mark Girouard is an architectural writer, a leading architectural historian, and biographer of James Stirling, as well as an authority on the country house. He was previously architectural editor of Country Life magazine, and was Slade Professor of Fine Art from 1975 to 1976. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1987. His book Elizabethan Architecture was published in 2009. Elizabethan theatre, he says, wasn’t at all a provincial thing but was tied into the classical world and Europe. There were ideas of geometry and proportion in the theatres, and there was this idea that the theatre was a miniature of the world. ‘Elizabethan theatre was a conscious re-creation of Roman theatres,’ he says.
Susan Abulhawa was born to refugees of the Six-Day War of 1967 when her family’s land was seized. She is the author of the acclaimed novel Mornings in Jenin, the profits of which partly go to the children’s charity she founded, Playgrounds for Palestine. She chooses five books about Palestine by Palestinian writers. She says what she sees among the young people in Palestine is humbling. ‘Students from Gaza University are telling us about how they’re missing basic necessities but mostly they’re starving intellectually – desperate for books and knowledge. What they’re living under is so inhuman but they have such remarkable spirit.’
Nicholas Jose has published short stories, essays, several acclaimed novels, and a memoir. He is Chair in Writing at the University of Western Sydney and Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University for 2009-2010. He is general editor of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature which is published internationally as The Literature of Australia. ‘You get this weird thing in Australia,’ he says. ‘It’s a highly urban place and yet the imagination of the writers so often goes to remote places and remote times. The landscape is so vast and unwritten that it is appealing to writers and I think that is something distinctive to Australia.’