“I have this imposter syndrome sometimes,” said Anthony Doerr, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of 2014’s All the Light We Cannot See. “I’m just a Caucasian guy who lives in Idaho and goes to the grocery store and can’t solve the sudoku puzzle in the Saturday paper. I don’t think of myself as some elite intellectual.” While that may be Doerr’s take, the rest of the world seems to disagree — his work has been translated into more than 40 languages.
Although Doerr has several books under his belt — he has written two collections of short stories and a memoir; he also writes a column on science books for the Boston Globe — All the Light We Cannot See made him a household name, a recognition he modestly admitted gave him “a feeling of ratification.” Doerr, who will join Pico Iyer for UCSB Arts & Lectures’ third installment of the popular Speaking with Pico series, spoke with the Independent recently from his home in Idaho.
What were your early literary influences? When I was 7 or 8, my mom read us The Chronicles of Narnia. I couldn’t believe that one person created this entire world. As I got older, I went through a Stephen King phase, and then I fell in love with the Beats — Kerouac, even William Burroughs. There was something transgressive about reading Burroughs — all that drinking and drug use — while my mom was downstairs fixing dinner.