Adam Johnson, who visited the Writers Institute in February 2012 has just received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for The Orphan Master's Son.
Here is a YouTube video from his visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZVAtO11X9A
More about Johnson's visit here last year: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/johnson_adam12.html
Nathan Englander, who visited us in March 2013, was one of two Pulitzer finalists.
Showing posts with label north korea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label north korea. Show all posts
Monday, April 15, 2013
Adam Johnson Wins Pulitzer for Fiction
Monday, February 13, 2012
Adam Johnson in the Times Union
"Johnson's research for the book [The Orphan Master's Son] included a closely monitored 2007 trip to North Korea. In an article for The Daily Beast, he described the odd sensation upon discovering that many of the photos he'd taken were slight variations on innumerable images taken by other tourists on a strictly controlled path."
"When you walk up to a North Korean and say, 'Hey, how are you doing?' or 'What's going on?' — those are aggressive, dangerous questions in a totalitarian state," Johnson said.
Read more.
Johnson visits this Valentine's Day, 2/14.
Can North Korea Be Fictionalized?
"In the stories we tell ourselves in the West, we expect to be the central character in our own narrative; we are a society of individuals and no matter how much we love others, they're secondary characters. The DPRK is exactly the opposite. There's one national narrative, tailored and maintained by script writers and censors. In a totalitarian world that script writer is responsible for everything that happened."
"If you're a secondary character in North Korea, your aptitude for certain things and your class background sends you down paths, maybe to be a doctor, or a peasant farmer, or a soldier, or a music player. Your own wants and desires are only going to get in the way of the role you've been given and that you have to play if you're going to survive."
Isaac Stone Fish interviews Adam Johnson in the journal Foreign Policy.
Johnson visits Tuesday, Feb. 14th.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Where Spontaneity Is Almost Impossible
Adam Johnson, who visits 2/14, talked about his new novel of North Korea on the PBS NewsHour, Monday 1/30.
"It seemed, as a writer, that this was perhaps the most difficult place on Earth to be fully human, a place where spontaneity is almost impossible, where confessing your heart and your wants and desires run counter to the state and could get you in trouble, and because I found very few works from North Korean writers themselves that they weren't allowed to tell their own stories, that I thought this was something that literacy fiction could do, could fill in this void." More.
Picture: Performers at the Children's Palace in Pyongyang.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
From Absurdity to Atrocity
Sam Sacks in the WSJ reviews The Orphan Master's Son, an epic novel about North Korea by Adam Johnson, who visits February 14th.
"We don't know what's really going on in that strange place [North Korea], but a disquieting glimpse suggesting what it must be like can be found in this brilliant and timely novel."
More.
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