Budding writers should take risk to tell best tales: Irish author Colum McCann

Thiruvananthapuram, Feb. 03: Young writers must take risk and dare various things including embarrassment and sentiment to try and tell the possible stories they can, says Irish author Mr Colum McCann.

Noting that writers are constantly inventing themselves as long as they are daring to do something new, Mr McCann said young writers should be prepared to rise from failures and continue their creative pursuits.

In a conversation on “Empathy in Writing, Seeing Both Sides” with Ms Pooja Nair at the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters (MBIFL 2023) here on Friday, Mr McCann, who is residing in New York, said budding writers must write what they don’t know even as people would say that they should write what they know.

“Logically and philosophically the only thing you can write is what you actually know. If you write towards what you want to know, you discover new things. So, you are accessing different parts of yourself like an empathetic leap even into yourself,” he said.

Mr McCann said empathy is the ability to live into somebody else’s shoes. “Accessing a part of your own soul that has a kinship with the soul of someone else. It sounds like an act of kindness onto yourself.”  

Mr McCann said his seventh novel ‘Apeirogon’ (2020) is based on real life incidents during his tour to Israel and West Bank along with a group of artists, including musicians, writers and activists six years ago. The book recounts the lives of Israeli graphic designer Rami Elhanan and Palestinian scholar Bassam Aramin.”

Recalling the incident, he said “On the edge of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, I saw two men sitting on a long wooden table there. They lost their daughters in separate incidents.  I was in tears after listening to their stories.”

Mr McCann said after going back to New York, he was haunted by the story. “Writers write towards their obsessions and hence I wrote this book,” he added.

MBIFL 2023, (also known as ‘Ka’ in Malayalam), features an impressive line-up of Nobel and Booker Prize winners and Jnanpith awardees, among over 400 eminent names in creative fields.