10 posts tagged “interview”

The Guardian: Some people see you as a guru. Do you accept that?

Paulo Coelho: Of course not.

The Guardian: Is it flattering?

Paulo Coelho: No. It’s totally out of reality.

The Guardian: Are you a political writer?

Paulo Coelho: Everybody is a political person, whether you say something or you are silent. A political attitude is not whether you go to parliament, it’s how you deal with your life, with your surroundings. I am at least giving the readers the sense they are not alone. But instead of trying to answer the question, “What is the meaning of life?” I try to give some meaning to my life.

The Guardian: When you were 17 your parents had you committed to an asylum.

Paulo Coelho: Yes, three times, and also I was in jail three times, but I never saw myself as a victim. This is part of my journey. My parents wanted me to follow their dreams, not my dreams, and the simple fact that I didn’t accept that does not make me a criminal or an outcast. I thought, “One day I will write about it,” and I did. I wrote Veronica Decides to Die, and the book was about this: accept your differences and this is how you make a difference.

You can listen 3 minutes of the interview by clicking here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2009/mar/19/paulo-coelho-question-time

Or you can read the whole interview by clicking here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/19/paulo-coelho-interview

Check it out Paulo Coelho's A Life in the Day interview from Sunday Times Magazine.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5931957.ece

You hail from Brazil, one of the most beautiful countries in the world. Where do you like traveling in your own country? What other destinations are your favorite travel destinations? Any dream destination you’ve always been yearning to visit but still haven’t gotten round to?

There are many wonderful places in my country, but I must say that my hometown, Rio de Janeiro, always mesmerizes me.

Fantástico

Published 07 August 2008

on www.newstatesman.com/society/2008/08/readers-film-internet-despite

The American journalist Jeff Jarvis has come by my house to interview me. Here I am, face to face with one of the most incisive technology journalists of today - via his blog BuzzMachine - and he is asking me what I think of the internet. I find the idea mind-boggling, to say the least; it would have been unthinkable a decade ago, when Google was a fledgling search engine and the internet a mystery to most of us.

Still, I had a suspicion at the time about the potential of this new medium, and I decided to launch my own website and newsletter, and opened an email account for readers who wanted to contact me. One of the myths about writers is that we write our books in lonely ivory towers; in my case, I was never very keen on the notion of the reclusive author working in solitude, and have always tried to interact with my readers.

So I've spent a lot of time on my website, knowing that it is one of the rare public platforms, besides the traditional book signing, open to me. Yet, despite the success of the site and newsletter, I felt that more could be done - but what? The answer is the result of ten years' fascination with the medium.

My virtual journey

In 2006, I decided that, rather than separate myself from the world, I would take a different path. The road is made by walking - this is the first tenet of every adventure. You place your foot on uncharted terrain and from there the road somehow imposes itself on the walker. I left my house in France for three months, visiting Tunisia, Italy, Bulgaria and Ukraine, before I embarked on my Trans-Siberian journey, a 5,772-mile trip from Moscow to Vladivostok.

I shared my experiences every two to three days with readers from all over the globe via my blog. The feedback was incredible - despite my being in this remote region, I wasn't alone: people were travelling with me through my words. The blog lasted a couple of months; I knew, though, that this first contact had to evolve somehow. But how?

Just like magic

When I returned home, I had a couple of months before the publication of my novel, The Witch of Portobello. I knew from previous experience that the free-sharing of my book over the internet would increase its visibility, so I didn't hesitate to post it on peer-to-peer websites and on my blog.

The more I've ventured into the virtual world, the more I have realised that the internet has a logic of its own and its credo is: share everything freely. This was my message when I spoke at the "Digital, Life, Design" conference in Munich earlier this year.

The feedback from readers and media alike to the internet incarnation of The Witch of Portobello was such that I started a blog called the Pirate Coelho, where I posted links to free electronic copies of my books. Of course, this "underground" activity was undertaken without the knowledge of my publishers. But on the official side of things, I was also exploring as many ways as possible of communicating with my public via websites such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube.

Share and share alike

Then, one day last year in Geneva, after visiting the blogs of some of my readers, I had an idea: why not work together? From this simple thought emerged the Experimental Witch project. I extended an online invitation to participate in a film adaptation of The Witch of Portobello. Aspiring film-makers were asked to film one of the 13 tales that the book interweaves and post the results on YouTube. Musicians could use MySpace to send ideas for the soundtrack.

Now, the submissions are all in, and the winning entries will be announced on my birthday, 24 August. Though some excellent work may be left aside in arriving at a manageable length for the film, this distant collaboration means I have been able to see the film my readers picture as they read my work.

So I looked at Jeff after he'd finished his questions, and asked him: "What else should I do?"

Apparently, Jeff thinks I'm doing just fine.

Paulo Coelho

Paulo Coelho's "Brida" is published by HarperCollins (£14.99); visit http://paulocoelhoblog.com

August 4, 2008 10:08 AM

At MediaGuardian.co.uk

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2008/08/novelist_paul_coelho_finds_the.html

Paulo Coelho certainly has nothing against selling books. He has sold an astounding 100m copies of his novels, writes Jeff Jarvis.

But he also believes in giving them away. He is a pirate. Coelho discovered the power of free when a fan posted a Russian translation of one of his novels online and book sales there climbed from 3,000 to 100,000 to 1m in three years. "This happened in English, in Norwegian, in Japanese and Serbian," he said. "Now when the book is released in hard copy, the sales are spectacular."

So Coelho started linking to pirated versions of his books from his own website. But when he bragged about this at the Burda Digital Lifestyle Design conference in Munich last January, he got in trouble with his US publisher, HarperCollins, whose then head, Jane Friedman, called him.

Friedman had caught Coelho red-handed - one of the supposedly unauthorised versions he linked to had the author's own notes in it. "She said, 'Paulo, come on, don't shit me'." He was pirating himself. So they reached a compromise: each month, a different Coelho novel can be read for free in the publisher's online reader, which prevents making pirated copies. Meanwhile Coelho is off to new digital frontiers. He Twitters. He blogs and enjoys exploring a different kind of writing online. "I think your language for your blog is totally different from your language in the Guardian, right? So we have to adapt ourselves. I have a lot of fun doing this."

When I saw him in his Paris apartment, he had a small Flip video camera ready so he could join in online video conversations at Seesmic.com. His digitally savvy assistant, Paula Bracconot, suggested having his readers take pictures of themselves reading his books, which they would put on Flickr; hundreds responded immediately. He webcasts his events and 10,000 show up online.

For his next novel, The Winner is Alone, Coelho asked his readers to help explain the pull of fashion brands. And for his last novel, The Witch of Portobello, he asked readers to film parts of the story from any character's perspective. If the results are any good, he'll have an editor turn it into a movie, The Experimental Witch.

Coelho is the thoroughly modern author. But he still believes in print. For him, this isn't a matter of print v digital. It's a question of what comes when you add digital to print. What does it bring him? "It gives me a lot of joy," he said, "because writing is something you do alone." He recalled the night in 2006 when he read that he had become the second best-selling author in the world. He was bursting. "My God, my wife is sleeping. How can I share this news with anybody?" Now he can shout it from the mountaintop of his blog.

For Coelho, digital is about relationships. The internet always is - and he is revelling in the new connections it gives him with his readers. He loves to meet them face-to-face. He mentioned on his blog that he'd like to invite a few readers to a party in a remote town in Spain and he was shocked that they were willing to fly in from as far away as Japan. Now he regularly invites readers to his parties.

"What should I do next?" he asked me in Paris. I was flummoxed because he's doing so much. Then I suggested that the next time he's in a cafe and bored, he should send a message to his fans via Twitter and his blog and I'll just bet a few will be in the neighbourhood and will drop by to share a cup of coffee. For Coelho is not just an author to them now. He's a friend.

Jeff Jarvis is a journalism professor at the City University of New York and blogs at buzzmachine.com

Aart: Your biography, written by Fernando Morais and recently published in Brasil, makes scandal because it pointed out that you had had three homosexual relations being younger. So what you think about homosexuality; about the vision of the Catholic church and others religions as well as of the political suppression concerning it in many countries?

It is not for me to judge the sexual choices of people(I wrote a book on that, “Eleven Minutes”). I had three homosexual relationships when I was 19, because my parents used to say “if you want to be an artist, this also means that you are homosexual”. They planted this doubt in my mind, and I decided to check by myself - I could never live with this interrogation mark for the rest of my life. I tried, I did not like, and I realized by then that I am not a homosexual. That said, I am convinced that people are free to choose, and sexuality, with few exceptions that involve forcing others to do something that they don’t like ( like rape and pedophily ) , is a personal choice.

Paulo Coelho
www.paulocoelhoblog.com