Scotiabank Giller Prize Spotlight: Antoine Wilson
September 9, 2022
Antoine Wilson’s novel Mouth to Mouth has been longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Antoine Wilson is the author of the novels Panorama City and The Interloper. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, Best New American Voices, and The Los Angeles Times, among other publications, and he is a contributing editor of A Public Space. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin, he lives in Los Angeles.
What/who inspires you to write?
First and foremost, I get very grumpy if I stop writing for three or more days. I’m not sure what’s behind it. My theory is that I have to offload all of the accumulated subjectivity. The form doesn’t matter: fiction, journal, poems… The inspiration to write novels, specifically, comes from reading great works of fiction. I started out under the influence of James Baldwin, Paul Auster, and Thomas Pynchon. Later, Nabokov. More lately, everyone from Dorthe Nors to Patrick Modiano.
Do you have a favourite passage/quote from a book?
From War and Peace, Prince Andrei’s near-death experience at the Battle of Austerlitz, when he’s been knocked down on the battlefield: “How was it that I did not see the lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes! All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky….” (War and Peace, Book One, Part Three, Chapter 16.) After almost 300 pages of Tolstoy’s godlike objectivity, we’re suddenly thrust into Andrei’s consciousness, and the book just cracks wide open.
I’m also a fan of these lines from Schopenhauer’s Art of Controversy: “Take any large, massive, heavy building: this hard, ponderous body that fills so much space exists, I tell you, only in the soft pulp of the brain. There alone, in the human brain, has it any being. Unless you understand this, you can go no further.” Could be an epigraph for any one of my books.
Where is your favourite place to write?
The kitchen table, when everyone else is out of the house. But since those ideal conditions are rare, I’ve trained myself to be able to write pretty much anywhere.
Do you have a tradition for every time you finish a book?
Traditionally, I freak out about what the next one will be.
What are you reading now?
Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marías.
What is your favorite CanLit book?
Open Secrets by Alice Munro.