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THIS WEEK on the GWA Podcast, I interview one of the most important, pioneering and impactful writers and novelists working today, Ruth Ozeki.\xa0\n\nIn this episode, we deep dive into looking, writing, observation and perception in a fascinating discussion that traverses objects, the written form, imagination and memoir. \n\nShe is the author of four novels, My Year of Meats (1998); All Over Creation (2003); A Tale for the Time Being (which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013 and won the LA Times Book Prize); and more recently, The Book of Form and Emptiness (for which she won the Women\u2019s Prize for Fiction) \u2013 an extraordinary novel centred on 14 year old Benny who, after his father dies, begins to hear voices, with other objects in a magical realist sense taking on roles to speak. Ozeki\u2019s work is powerful, it breaks boundaries and reinvents storytelling and often melds ancient ideas with contemporary ones \u2013 looking at how they relate to our technology, religion, politics or pop culture.\xa0\n\nIn addition to her writing work, Ozeki is a Zen Buddhist priest, ordained in 2010 and a role that has influenced her two most recent novels; and a filmmaker, hailed for her 1995 work Halving the Bones, that looks at three generations of Ruth\u2019s maternal family history from Japan, to Hawaii and to a suburb in Connecticut.\xa0\n\nBut, aside from this, it is also Ozeki\u2019s non-fiction work that I highly admire, in particular her 2016 book \u201cTimecode of a Face\u201d \u2013\xa0a part-memoir, part-experiment \u2013 influenced by a Harvard art historian that saw her sit in front of a mirror for three hours and examine her face as she traces each line, mark, crease and feature back to story from her past \u2013 which I cannot wait to get into in this episode! \n\nFollow us:\nKaty Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel\nSound editing by Mikaela Carmichael\nArtwork by @thisisaliceskinner\nMusic by Ben Wetherfield\n\nhttps://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/\n\nTHIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY OCULA: https://ocula.com/