Speakers Karen Thompson Walker: Novelist
Fiction writer Karen Thompson Walker explores the connection between fear and the imagination.
Why you should listen to her:
In Karen Thompson Walker's 2012 book The Age of Miracles, a young girl and her family awake one morning to discover that the rotation of the Earth has suddenly begun to slow, stretching the length of the 24-hour day and throwing the natural world into disarray. It's a big, speculative book, but at heart, it's a simple human drama, told through the eyes of an observant adolescent girl.
A former book editor at Simon & Schuster, Walker worked on the novel for three years, an hour each morning before work. Fun fact: The Age of Miracles was published on June 21, 2012 -- the longest day of the year. Since then, the bestselling, much-awarded book has been translated into 29 languages.
"The book requires a suspension of disbelief – yet at the same time you look out of the window right now and you think, 'This could happen.'"Suzanne Baboneau, Simon & Schuster
Quotes by Karen Thompson Walker
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“Fear is … a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do.”
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“Our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination … a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out.”
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“Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?”
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Karen Thompson Walker: What fear can teach us
- 11:30 Posted: Jan 2013
Karen Thompson Walker on the Web
Related Speakers
Conferences
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- TEDGlobal 2012