In search of an Author

• Chi Ta-Wei: On books that keeps teaching us new things

  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.

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  32:51
• Mariana Enriquez: On writing our deepest fears

  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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  58:21
• Claudia Durastanti: On the fictitiousness of the stories we tell ourselves

  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.

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  43:21
• Shahrnūsh Pārsīʹpūr: On being distanced from the place and people of your books

  “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.

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  38:38
• Fernanda Trías: On pushing your characters off a cliff

  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.

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  54:56

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