Conversations in an intimate and uninterrupted environment with Nobel Prize winners in literature is the proposal of Word of Nobel, the new CaixaForum documentary series that premieres on the free platform this Thursday. The four episodes of the first installment, each lasting one hour, feature the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, the Frenchman Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, the Turkish Orhan Pamuk and Abdulrazak Gurnah, originally from Zanzibar and resident in England. .
The series is created by journalist Xavi Ayén and photographer Kim Manresa. “Since 2005 we have been interviewing Nobel Prize winners for La Vanguardia and we had the idea of converting the format to audiovisual,” explains Ayén, editor-in-chief of Culture at La Vanguardia, about the origin of the project. “We always go to the cities where they live and talk in the place where they meet us, often their house,” he continues. He also advances that they are already preparing more interviews that will be added to the platform, "although they will not be the 28 that we have already done for the newspaper because many of them have already died."
Ayén directs the series together with Benet Román, in charge of bringing the format to audiovisual. “I wanted to maintain the way Ayén and Manresa work and, in fact, each program begins with them arriving in the author's city and remembering the experience of the previous interview,” says Román. "Then we enter the interview and in the final part there is a walk in which we see how Manresa takes the photos that we will also end up seeing on the screen."
The objective set was “not to spoil the climate of complicity that Ayén finds in the interviews and to make the interviewee forget that we were there after 10 minutes.” Ayén makes a biographical journey and a human profile of each author through their work and, thanks to the atmosphere that is created, the journalist thinks “that the authors are able to go beyond what they would explain in a promotional interview for their work.” last book".
Regarding the guests, Ayén advances that the interview with Le Clézio took place in Nice, with a route closely related to the Second World War. “He told us stories that were still very vivid, like the bombings he saw and the aftermath.” They did the interview with Pamuk on a balcony of his house in Istanbul, with spectacular views of the Bosphorus Strait, and which is the place where he writes. “He explained to us how his father encouraged him to write while the rest considered him the fool of the family.”
Gurnah was visited in Canterbury. “All of his books reflect the experience of people who emigrate based on his experience, someone who arrives in England at the age of 18 and ends up being a university professor but who does not feel like he belongs in one place or another.” And in a snowy Oslo they met Fosse, “one of the most famous theater authors in the world who explains to us how converting to Catholicism and literature helped him overcome alcohol addiction problems.”
“People should not be afraid to watch the program if they do not know the author's work because the Nobel Prize winners have had a quite interesting life, which they also know how to explain very well as the good writers that they are,” Román points out in conclusion.
