Poets & Writers Theater

In this video, Samantha Harvey accepts the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital (Jonathan Cape, 2023), which snapshots one day in the lives of six astronauts traveling through space. “What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves, and what we do to life on Earth, human and otherwise, we do to ourselves,” says Harvey in her speech.

“Stories should not protect us, stories should expose us...” Israeli author David Grossman, who received the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for his novel A Horse Walks Into a Bar (Jonathan Cape, 2017) with his translator Jessica Cohen, talks about how all stories are multilayered and some can even trap us in this 92Y video.

“What I love about water is that it spends its whole time falling,” begins Alice Oswald as she introduces her poem “A Short Story of Falling” from her 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize–winning collection, Falling Awake (Jonathan Cape, 2016). “It’s always, apparently, trying to find the lowest place possible and when it finds the lowest place possible, it lies there wide awake.”

“We, too, are inventing a life form of our own—not out of body parts but out of the zeros and ones of code.” In this Vintage Books video, Jeanette Winterson talks about reimagining Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for her most recent novel, Frankissstein: A Love Story (Jonathan Cape, 2019), which was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize.

“The lyric is a kind of small gift, and the fiction is more like putting on a theatrical production.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Michael Ondaatje speaks about the differences in writing a poem versus a novel, his mentors, and what he discovers through the research that goes into his novels. Ondaatje recently won the Golden Man Booker Prize for The English Patient, and his novel Warlight (Jonathan Cape, 2018) is longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize.

In this video, Ottessa Moshfegh accepts the 2016 PEN/Hemingway Award for her debut novel, Eileen (Jonathan Cape, 2016). The book is one of four debut novels longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize.

"My fascination with birds goes back so long.... When I was about five or six, I think I used to try and sleep with my hands behind my back like wings." Helen Macdonald discusses her memoir, H Is For Hawk (Jonathan Cape, 2014), which received the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction, and won the 2014 Costa Book Award this week.

"There is a distinct difference between reading a novel and reading a novel by someone you know." The author of acclaimed novels such as Atonement, Amsterdam, Saturday, and On Chesil Beach discusses his latest novel, Sweet Tooth, at last year's Louisiana Literature Festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.