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FiveBooks Interviews
Hans Ulrich Obrist has been called the most influential individual in the international art world. Originally from Switzerland, he is currently co-director of the Serpentine Gallery in London’s Hyde Park, where he has pushed a multi-disciplinary approach to curating contemporary art, hosting two-day marathons with writers, artists, architects and critics. His breakfast salon, the Brutally Early Club, meets at 6.30am. 'When I started out, curating was a very obscure profession,' he says. 'But now on the internet we come across it every day - blogs and websites are curated; even the high street is curated.'
From Coldplay’s first video to Ian Dury’s biopic, director Mat Whitecross has come a long way since his dad bought him a video camera at 14. He talks about the FiveBooks that have inspired his career.
Can novels be revolutionary? Amanda Craig chooses FiveBooks which have changed attitudes - to animals, women, marriage and power… and which celebrate the indomitability of the human spirit.
Jewish Book Week begins in London on Saturday and novelist Simon Mawer will be one of the speakers. Here he chooses FiveBooks about forgiveness and wonders if Christ would have said of the Nazis, ‘Forgive them even if they know exactly what they do.’
Author Matt Lynn says every SAS guy he meets these days is off fighting in Iraq for one of the Private Military Corporations, which has given him the idea for a series of thrillers about mercenaries. Here he chooses FiveBooks that show British thriller writing at its best.
Poet Nigar Hasan-Zadeh is part of the Festival of Azerbaijani Arts that culminates with a gala night of Azeri music at London's Royal Festival Hall March 7 (www.butafestival.com). Azerbaijani culture is at the heart of her FiveBooks choices.
Sex in a slaughterhouse, tango in a brothel waiting room, a culture in which meat is synonymous with women’s bodies – no wonder they need a shrink. Chris Moss chooses FiveBooks on Argentina’s psychoanalytic culture.
Catullus’s poems to Lesbia start with the tingling sense of desire, and then the gloriously happy, loved-up phase followed by poems that put a knife through your heart when she’s been unfaithful to him. Classics lover Charlotte Higgins chooses FiveBooks that reveal the agonies and the ecstasies of the ancients.
The award-winning novelist says the Holocaust was not madness – it was a rational technology. To have only an emotional response is to avoid thinking about the issues. He chooses FiveBooks on man’s inhumanity to man and how to make sense of it.
Hilary Chute says the term 'graphic novels' is a shallow bid for respectability. She chooses the best five examples of 'graphic narratives,' 'comics journalism' and 'autobifictionalography.' That's comics to you.