I'm very drawn to Eastern Europe, so I like a Hungarian writer who wrote in French called Emil Cioran; he was always good for giving me such a stir.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My favourite authors are Milan Kundera and Jeanette Winterson.
I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.
We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.
The poetic prose that most interests me is that of Henri Michaux.
I'm most impressed by the Russian writers, so I love reading the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Another author who has informed the way I think is the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal.
In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first.
I wish more Italian literature were translated and read in English. I've discovered so many extraordinary and diverse writers: Lalla Romano, Carlo Cassola. Beppe Fenoglio, Giorgio Manganelli, just to name a few.
Now, actors get so familiarized with Eastern Europe. I never imagined I'd get as familiar with Budapest and Prague and places like that in my life.
My favourite author is Leon Trotsky - the political philosophy and the way he writes is beautiful, and really relevant, too.
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