Margaret Atwood & Russell Banks 
The World Split Open: Great Authors on How and Why We Write 

Since 1984, Literary Arts has welcomed many of the world’s most renowned authors and storytellers to its stage. In celebration of their thirty-year anniversary, Tin House Books has collected highlights from the series in a single volume.

Since 1984, Literary Arts has welcomed many of the world’s most renowned authors and storytellers to its stage for one of the country’s largest lectures series. Sold-out crowds congregate at Portland’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall to hear these writers’ discuss their work and their thoughts on the trajectory of contemporary literature and culture. In celebration of Literary Arts’ thirty-year anniversary, Tin House Books has collected highlights from the series in a single volume. Whether it’s Wallace Stegner exploring how we use fiction to make sense of life or Ursula K. Le Guin on where ideas come from, Margaret Atwood on the need for complex female characters or Robert Stone on morality and truth in literature, Edward P. Jones on the role of imagination in historical novels or Marilynne Robinson on the nature of beauty, these essays illuminate not just the world of letters but the world at large.

Über den Autor

Jeanette Winterson’s first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, won the 1985 Whitbread Prize for a First Novel and was adapted for television by Winterson in 1990. She won the 1987 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Passion. Her stage adaptation of The Power Book in 2002 opened at the Royal National Theatre, London. Winterson was made an officer of Order of the British Empire (OBE) at the 2006 New Year Honours ‚For services to literature.‘ She is a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Awards: Written on the Body won in the category of Lesbian Fiction in 1994, and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? won in the category of Lesbian Memoir or Biography in 2013. Sexing the Cherry won the 1989 E. M. Forster Award. Her latest novel, The Daylight Gate, was published in fall of 2013.