SUISSE News Fall 2022
Social / Events
Social / Events
October 2022
Award-Winning Swiss Author in Toronto
The Consulate General of Switzerland in Montreal in collaboration with the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto and Villa Charities hosted an Italian literary evening in Toronto on October 20, 2022, featuring award-winning Swiss author Fabio Andina, whose books have been published in Italian, German, French and Spanish. He spoke about his writing process, the publication process and the life a novel takes on after publication.
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“Before I start writing a story, I think about the story for days or even weeks or months,” said Andina. “I keep thinking about it during the day when I am walking in the mountains. And then when I’m ready, when I know that I have all the story in my mind, I sit down at the computer and for three or four or seven days nonstop, I just write.”
Andina encouraged students to keep reading and writing, and not to worry about their writing. “I remember when I started writing and most of the things I used to write were rubbish,” he said. “It’s like running a marathon. You have to keep writing and writing and writing.”
Andina started writing in the late 1990s when he went to California to study English. He fell in love with the beat generation while studying cinema in San Francisco, which sparked his own interest in writing. While there, he met and collaborated with the American poet, painter and social activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Twenty years after studying cinema, Andina is finally writing for the screen. He is in the process of adapting the stories in Sei tu, Ticino? into a screenplay and is working with a Swiss film company to turn La Pozza del Felice into a movie.“
As a writer, we spend so many hours writing in front of the computer alone,” said Andina. “Sometimes you write and write and write and nothing happens then suddenly, the big reward, the publisher, the film producer.”
Source: The Brock News
