Success for me is figuring out a way to spend most of my days doing something so engaging that I don’t feel as though I’m wasting my brief stay on Earth by paying attention to the wrong things. In the end, though, I write for the pleasure and the challenge of making stuff. And other days I felt overly aware that I had more readers than before looking at whatever I’d make, and that I wanted to both challenge and please those folks.
Some days working on Cloud Cuckoo Land I did feel an almost insane joy that I had the liberty to make something weird on my computer instead of driving six hours across Oregon to teach another workshop to help pay the mortgage. The main difference seems to be that the kids’ socks have gotten larger. The truth is that most days before that novel was published found me picking up dirty socks around the house and telling my kids to put the milk back in the fridge, and most days after found me picking up dirty socks around the house and telling my kids to put the milk back in the fridge. How have you digested this stratospheric status boost, and how did it tie into your choice to make Cloud Cuckoo Land your next project?ĪNTHONY DOERR: Hmm, I’m not sure I have digested what happened with All the Light, or that it would even be all that healthy for me to do so. The truth, I’m guessing, is somewhere in between. Some might see that as an enormous amount of pressure, others might frame it as free rein to do whatever you please. This new novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, is your first book after winning a Pulitzer Prize. You’ve documented your travels, you’ve published everything from award-winning stories to science writing to essays on photography and earthworks, and you also became a major literary phenomenon, with financial success and critical acclaim for your novel All the Light We Cannot See. SEAN HOOKS: You’re an author, humanist, family man, and lover of the natural world.
We emailed back and forth, me from Los Angeles and Anthony from Boise, Idaho, where he lives with his wife and children. On top of the Pulitzer, he’s also received the Story Prize, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. It joins his 2004 novel, About Grace his 2007 memoir, Four Seasons in Rome and two story collections - The Shell Collector (2002) and Memory Wall ( 2010 ) - to form a steadily growing body of significant work.ĭoerr was born and raised in Ohio, studied history at Bowdoin College, and earned his MFA in fiction from Bowling Green. The highly anticipated follow-up to his 2014 novel, the Pulitzer Prize–winning All the Light We Cannot See, is Cloud Cuckoo Land, which was released in September by Scribner. AUTHOR OF a half-dozen books now, Anthony Doerr is both a winner of prestigious awards and a fixture on the best-seller lists.
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