Arundhati Roy wins the 2021 Ubu Loca Prize!

 "the place for literature is built by writers and readers. It’s a fragile place in some ways, but an indestructible one. When its broken, we rebuild it. Because we need shelter. I very much like the idea of literature that is needed. Literature that provides shelter. Shelter of all kinds."
— Arundhati Roy, architect-turned-critic, and novelist), from her PEN America Freedom to Write lecture. 13 May, 2019

video of the lecture https://youtu.be/DvQZkMs-pa0

partial transcript https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/13/arundhati-roy-literature-shelter-pen-america

   

Her entire lecture is powerful, but don't miss her response to last question, which touches on the Architecture / Literature connection, being transcended by the complex metaphor of a Novel as City / World City / Portal to Utmost Happiness.

 

 

Find common ground [and] subject things to change

 "Objects! For me there are no such things! What counts are the relationships. They are infinite. ... And what is between ... I started by painting a space and then by furnishing it. The object is a dead thing. It only comes alive when it is activated. That is what poetry is, don't you see? Find the common ground between things. ... You have to subject things to change, to stop living on automatic."

— Georges Braque (in conversation with Paul Gruth), cited by Bernard Zurcher, Georges Braque: Life and Work p154, n17.

 

Elsewhere: "...the quality I value above all else in art ... [poetry] ... a matter of harmony, or rapports, of rhythm, and - most important for my own work - of 'metamorphosis'"

— Georges Braque (Richardson, Georges Braque 1959), cited by Dieter Buchhart, Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism (Aquavella, 2011) p50.