Just announced. Anthony Doerr has won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for All the Light We Cannot See. Once again the editors at NC were prescient. Here you can read Richard Farrell’s delightful 2012 interview with Doerr.
My earliest influence was maybe C.S. Lewis. I remember my mother reading The Chronicles of Narnia to me and my brothers; I was probably eight. And I remember asking her: “How did they make this book? How did they invent Narnia?” And she’d always say, “It was just one person who wrote these books. And he’s dead now.”
Dead! What? Dead people could tell stories that still held power over the living? I had always had a sense that books were like oranges on a tree, that they pre-existed in the world, and humans came along and plucked them. But now my mother was saying people made them. One person, one book at a time. That was a revelation: One weird old guy could use language, the cheapest of materials, and conjure whole worlds with it? Then he could die and those worlds could still hold sway?
via Manufacturing Dreams: An Interview with Anthony Doerr — Richard Farrell » Numéro Cinq.
Really nice words.