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Conversations about books and writing

How do we construct literary fiction? What kind of relationships are established between authors and readers using words? Let's take another look at some of our most recent chats with writers who have visited the CCCB to speak to us about their books and the art of imagining and creating stories.

Maggie O'Farrell

The writer Maggie O'Farrell, the author of the award-winning Hamnet and one of the undisputed voices of Anglo-Saxon literature, talks to the journalist Anna Guitart on the occasion of the publication of her latest novel The Marriage Portrait.

Cristina Rivera Garza: “To write is to create empty space”

In this interview, Cristina Rivera Garza, director of the Ph.D. in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston – the first Ph.D. of its kind in the United States – gives us a master class on writing as a process and as a collective act of accompanying readers. Read ...

Ali Smith

Making political writing into an art

Writer Ali Smith and filmmaker Sarah Wood talk with journalist Anna Guitart about their audiovisual piece Why We Write (2021), in which Smith pays tribute to the figure of Orwell and reflects on the shared vocation of making political writing into art.

Amélie Nothomb and Sergi Pàmies

The thirst for writing

Amélie Nothomb talks with the writer Sergi Pàmies, who has translated all of her books into Spanish, about her graphomania - she writes at least four hours a day - and about the origin of her stories, which have made her one of the great authors of French literature.

Margaret Atwood

Looking at the future

Margaret Atwood talks to cultural journalist Anna Guitart. The writer, famous for works such as The Handmaid’s Tale, talks about the future of human beings on a planet under threat, while reviewing her biography and her literary career.

Colson Whitehead

Harlem resonances

El autor Colson Whitehead habla con la escritora y traductora Míriam Cano sobre su obra y su última novela, El ritmo de Harlem, una novela sobre desigualdades de clase y la discriminación racial que aún hoy dominan la sociedad estadounidense.

Eva Baltasar

Lonely hunter's instinct

 In this conversation with the journalist Magí Camps, we discover the universe hidden in Mamut, the latest work of this sculptress of language, where the search for solitude and the call of motherhood take us to a rural world where poetry, black humor and animality are not absent.

Colm Tóibín and Jordi Puntí

The Secret Life of Writers

The Irish writer Colm Tóibín, who has just published The Magician, speaks with the writer Jordi Puntí about the power of fiction when offering insights into the lives of great creators.

Maria Stepanova

In memory of memory

The poet and essayist Maria Stepanova, one of the great figures of contemporary Russian literature, talks with the translator and curator of Other Voices, Other Russias, Jorge Ferrer about her work, a reflection on history and the mechanisms of memory.

Ludmila Ulitskaya and Vladimir Sorokin

History, novel, print

The history of Russia is also the history of a desire to remain at the center of the universal story. The successive vicissitudes of this will —the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, post-communist Russia— affect and are inscribed in the lives and literary works. Ulitskaya and Sorokin, ...

Rebecca Solnit

Writing, a gesture of hope

American writer and activist Rebecca Solnit talks about the influence of George Orwell's work on her career as an essayist and reveals a new, more optimistic and hopeful look at the legacy of the writer of 1984.

Anna Starobínets

Uses of the imagination

The novelist Anna Stabironets, one of the most outstanding authors of the new generation of Russian writers of fantastic fiction, talks to the writer Roser Cabré-Verdiell about the trade of explaining the imaginable and also the unimaginable.

Benjamín Labatut and Eloy Fernández Porta

Outside reason

How can we talk about mental health in the context of today's society? How can we find the meaning again after crossing the limit? Writers Benjamín Labatut and Eloy Fernández Porta talk, in a conversation moderated by journalist and writer Anna Pacheco, about madness, malaise and mental health due to the publication of their books La piedra de la locura and Los brotes negros.

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Isaac Rosa and Gemma Barricarte

The Future is Ours

The writer Isaac Rosa and the architect and activist Gemma Barricarte talk about the novel Lugar seguro to explore narratives that contribute to build future horizons.