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FiveBooks Interviews
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.
Turi Munthe is CEO and founder of Demotix – www.demotix.com – the multiple-awardwinning open newswire, with over 3,000 reporters in 190 countries around the world. Turi is English-French-Swedish and was brought up in London. He has been a publisher, editor, think-tank analyst (Middle East policy), lecturer, journalist and talking head. He has written for many of the world’s leading English-language newspapers, appeared on CNN, BBC, NBC, al-Jazeera, Asahi. He edited The Saddam Hussein Reader: Selections from Leading Writers on Iraq.
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.’
Born and educated in Ireland, Josephine Hart is the acclaimed author of six novels which include the bestselling Damage which sold over one million copies worldwide and was made into a major film directed by Louis Malle starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche. Her work has been translated into 28 languages. All of her five choices helped her research for her latest novel, The Truth About Love, which explores the importance of understanding the narrative of Irish history.
Simon Conway was born in California in 1967, educated in Britain and studied English literature at the University of Edinburgh. He served in the British army with the Black Watch and the Queen’s Own Highlanders. After leaving the military he worked for the HALO trust, clearing land mines and unexploded ordnance in Cambodia, Kosovo, Abkhazia, Eritrea and Sri Lanka. As Director of Landmine Action he ran projects in Western Sahara, Liberia and Guinea Bissau as well as successfully campaigning for an international treaty to ban cluster bombs. He has been following the Taliban since the mid-90s and exploring the extent to which the Taliban and al Qaeda are creations of the Pakistani Intelligence Services backed by Saudi money. In his latest book, A Loyal Spy, there are uncanny parallels between the plot and real life.
Adrienne Mayor is a research scholar in classics and history and philosophy of science at Stanford University. Her most recent book, Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates the Great, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy, was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award. The comparison between Mithradates and Osama bin Laden is, she says, a tempting one – Mithradates began with a really terrifying act of genocide, which lured the Romans into a costly, long and unwinnable war in the Near East. ‘It was quite a wild goose chase he led them on. And they lost track of him at the end of the Third Mithradatic War. In 63BC he died, old and free.’
The Snowman is Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø’s fifth internationally acclaimed novel featuring Inspector Harry Hole to be translated into English. Winner of the Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel (an accolade shared with Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson), Jo Nesbø’s books have been translated into 30 languages and he is regarded as one of Europe’s leading crime writers. Jo Nesbø played football for Norwegian team Molde and topped the charts in Norway with rock band Di Derre.
Steven Katz is Director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University, where he holds the Alvin J and Shirley Slater Chair in Jewish and Holocaust Studies. He was Chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Museum for five years and remains on the committee. He is one of the American representatives to the International Task Force on the Holocaust, established by the King of Sweden. He is the editor of the journal Modern Judaism, and has served on the editorial team of The Cambridge History of Judaism and The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Religious Thought. He is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Jewish Research and the Academy of Jewish Philosophy.
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.
Ivan Day is a celebrated food historian and the author of several books on the history of food. He has worked as a broadcaster, in both television and radio. His collections of antique books and equipment and re-creations of historic table settings have been exhibited at venues including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of London. He is also a talented cook and confectioner with 40 years’ experience in period cookery, and runs courses for the public at Wreay Farm in the Lake District.