Literary Birthday – 26 June – Nicholas Hogg

Happy Birthday, Nicholas Hogg, born 26 June 1974.

Quotes

Consciousness requires us to validate who we are, what we are doing, and why. The array of belief systems throughout the world shows how vital this is to our core. Myth, believing in something that we have little or no evidence for, is something that defines us as human. Folk stories and fairy tales are fascinating documents of this need to attach meaning to existence. (via)
You’ve got to get out of where you’re from and your culture to loosen rigid ways of thinking, and see how other people’s ideas and morals and values are formed. Then you wouldn’t be so absolutely right. Whether you’re left wing, whether you’re a liberal, whether you’re right wing. To have that moral certainty about what you think is right or wrong is strange. (via)
The writer should be attempting to understand every point of view. We’ve superimposed culture onto our animal state. All of this is just a phantom way of seeing the world, it’s all invented, whatever point of view you have. (via)
Unless you understand where somebody is coming from, how can you remedy it? There’s a big, big difference to understanding and condoning something. So you understand how somebody grows up in a particular place, deprived of something, or indoctrinated with an idea, how they come to that viewpoint. You have to understand how that individual got there. If that’s what an author does by colouring that person’s world, by creating a vision, a narrative, then that’s what great writing can do. It gives the reader the ability to emphasise with a particular character’s predicament and how their mindset has been formed. (via)

Nicholas Hogg is an English author, short story writer, and poet. His first novel, Show Me the Sky, was published in 2008 and was followed by The Hummingbird and the Bear in 2011, and Tokyo in 2015. His short stories have won numerous prizes and have been broadcast by the BBC. He was awarded a 2018 Art Omi fellowship in New York.

Source for image: Nicholas Hogg, Credit for photo: John Need

by Amanda Patterson