Saturday on the Couch: with Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Doerr

Since its release in 2014, All The Light We Cannot See has rapidly been embraced as a modern classic. This beautifully-written coming-of-age story has already earned author Anthony Doerr a Pulitzer Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. 

This year Australian readers declared it an all-time favourite, voting it #1 on Dymocks’ annual Top 101 poll.

To celebrate, Starts at 60 will be showcasing Anthony Doerr’s remarkable career through the month of June – starting with some words of inspiration from the man himself.

Congratulations on this wonderful book, Anthony! How did the idea to write your book originate?

Eleven years ago I was riding a train heading into New York City. We started heading underground, going probably 50 or 60 kms per hour, and the man in the seat in front of me was talking on his cell phone when his call dropped. He got angry, swearing and whacking his phone against the seat back in frustration. And I remember thinking: That little device you’re attacking, Mister, is a miracle. And we’ve forgotten that it’s a miracle.

I studied my own mobile phone and thought: this thing has a receiver and a transmitter inside it, it’s smaller than a deck of playing cards, and it can connect me with someone in Tibet or Timbuktu or Moscow. People in Australia right now are calling people in the Caribbean and they’re doing it with handheld devices and invisible light!

So that very afternoon, ten years ago, I wrote a title into my notebook: All the Light We Cannot See. I was thinking of all the electromagnetic radiation in the air that humans are incapable of seeing, (though later, of course, I started playing around with other understandings of light and dark, visibility and invisibility.) And that night, I started a piece of fiction in which a girl reads a story to a boy over a radio.

What’s your favourite thing about being a published author?

It means I get to spend my life around books, the most breathtaking technology humans have ever created.

What are some of the things you love about bookstores?

I love their smells. I love the people that work in them. I love that I enter a bookshop thinking I want one specific title, and end up discovering a dozen more.

What’s the most recent book that you read and loved?

Jim Shepard’s The Book of Aron.

If you could meet any author, dead or alive, who would you like to meet?

Pliny the Elder.

What book had the biggest impact on you as a child?

Probably The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Have you ticked All The Light We Cannot See off your reading list yet? Share your thoughts in the comments below!