NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Congratulations Rawi! In light of this latest honour, I here re-post our interview, conducted last month in Montreal: 

Rawi Hage was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of that country’s civil war. He immigrated to Canada in 1992. He is a writer, a visual artist, and a curator whose debut novel, De Niro’s Game
(2006), was shortlisted for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2006 Governor General’s Award for English fiction. It is currently shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. House of Anansi Press will publish Rawi’s eagerly anticipated second novel, Cockroach, in fall 2008. He lives in Montreal where I caught up with him at the Blue Met International Literary Festival.

We talk about living in war conditions, New York, Deer Hunter and Russian roulette, art as memory, the absurdity of war, the dangers of organized religion, fundamentalism, politics and the writer, canoeing and moose, women’s clothing, Arabic poetry and the influence of fathers.

 Copyright © 2008 by Nigel Beale 

Please listen here:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 8:20 AM and is filed under AUDIO: Author Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.