Daphne Kalotay

Daphne Kalotay's fiction collection, Calamity and Other Stories (Doubleday), was short listed for the 2005 Story Prize, and her debut novel, Russian Winter (HarperCollins), won the 2011 Writers’ League of Texas Fiction Prize, made the long list for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and has been published in 21 foreign editions.

Her latest novel is Sight Reading.

From the author's 2013 Q & A with Marc Foster at Dead Darlings:

Dead Darlings: Both of your novels, “Sight Reading” and “Russian Winter,” are rooted in performing arts – music and ballet, respectively. Can you tell me what drives your fascination with the subject area, and what you think are special opportunities and challenges in working with this material?

Daphne Kalotay: I never consciously decided to write about this as a topic, but I’ve long been drawn to stories about artists. Mainly I think I’m curious about the combination of intense dedication and relaxed creativity necessary to create great art–but in the performing arts there is that added element of a viewing/listening public, and the action of performing lends itself more generously to drama on the page than a solitary vocation such as being a writer.

On the other hand, it’s a definite challenge to recreate movement (in the case of dance) and sound (in the case of music) through language alone. In writing about ballet, the challenge was to find a happy medium between the correct technical terms, which a ballerina would know but a layperson would not, and simply describing the choreography; I tried to explain what it would feel like for the dancers while also painting a visual picture for the reader. Similarly, in Sight Reading I wanted the reader to be able to...[read on]

Visit Daphne Kalotay's website.

The Page 69 Test: Sight Reading.

Writers Read: Daphne Kalotay.

--Marshal Zeringue