Karen Thompson Walker: The Connect between Fear and the Imagination.

January 6, 2013 by Gail
Filed under VidStyle

Imagine you’re a shipwrecked sailor adrift in the enormous Pacific. You can choose one of three directions and save yourself and your shipmates but each choice comes with a fearful consequence too. How do you choose? In telling the story of the whale ship Essex, novelist Karen Thompson Walker shows how fear propels imagination.

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ABOUT Karen Thompson Walker

“Karen Thompson Walker was born and raised in San Diego, California, where ‘The Age of Miracles’ is set. She studied English and creative writing at UCLA, where she wrote for the UCLA Daily Bruin.

After College, she worked as a newspaper reporter in the San Diego area before moving to New York City to attend the Columbia University MFA programme.

A former book Editor at Simon & Schuster, she wrote ‘The Age of Miracles’ in the mornings before work. She worked on the novel for three years, an hour each morning before work. In it, 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. It has gone on to become a bestselling, multi-awarded book that has been translated into 29 languages. Karen is the recipient of the 2011 Sirenland Fellowship as well as a Bomb Magazine fiction prize.”