Audio: Rocking The Boat
Nam Le interviewed by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Dylan Thomas Prize winning author Nam Le sat down with Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer in a little parlour off the bar in the Hospitality Suite at this year’s International Festival of Authors. You might hear in the background of the podcast the tinkle of teaspoons and the distant clatter of hotel china. It was all very glamorous!

Nam Le is a poised and charming new writer on the scene; his debut collection is being suitably lauded everywhere. The Boat is an unlinked collection of stories, and unlinked in the most pleasing fashion. Nam leaps geographic and cultural boundaries with seemingly effortless ventriloquism. Nam and Kathryn cover here identity, appropriation, autobiography, metafiction, as well as, how to publish a collection of stories. Have a listen, and then go out and buy this book.

Nam Le Interview
(35:00) (4.6mb)
(This is an audio mp3 file — please save it to your local drive (c:\, etc.) if you plan on listening to it more than once. It will save us the bandwidth. Right click, or click hold for Mac users, and choose “Save Target As” or “Save Link As” or whatever comes up that looks like that, and save it somewhere where you know how to get to it. Luddite.)

Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia.  His debut collection of short stories, THE BOAT, was published in 2008, and won the Dylan Thomas Prize and the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35″ Award.  Nam Le is also a recipient of the Pushcart Prize and the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and his work has appeared in venues including Zoetrope, A Public Space, One Story, Conjunctions, NPR’s Selected Shorts, Prospect Magazine, and numerous anthologies.  Currently, Le is the fiction editor of the Harvard Review and the David Wong Fellow at the University of East Anglia.  More at www.namleonline.com. (Photo credit: Singing Bowl Media.)

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer is the author of the short story collection Way Up (3rd prize Danuta Gleed Award) the novel, The Nettle Spinner (shortlisted for the 2005 Books in Canada/Amazon.ca First Novel Award). A new novel, Perfecting, is forthcoming in Spring 2009. She is the magazine editor for Bookninja.com, and teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. Kathryn’s review work has appeared in many newspapers and journals, including The Globe and Mail and The San Francisco Chronicle. www.kathrynkuitenbrouwer.com