Trent University Luminary: Yann Martel

Trent University Luminary: Yann Martel

3 minutes, 23 seconds in length

Description: Author Yann Martel stands in an (unidentified) room.

Yann Martel:

My name is Yann Martel and I studied Philosophy at Trent.

I had felt as good as the success of the book. It's hard to make a living being an artist, to write a book that connected with so many people was incredibly gratifying and then to have this secondary thing called a movie based on my book is also a wonderful adventure.

Stories are important to us, and whether stories are told in one form or another, it's important that we hear stories. And of course the movies differ from the book as one expects, but if it brings more people to the book, that's great and if people have read the book, then I think they'll see the movie as a good companion piece.

So no, I believe in artistic risks. Making that movie was a huge risk for the studio and for the director, for Ang Lee. And I'm grateful we did it, that the studio did it, and I like the movie very much. It's a very good companion piece to the book.

Well I have two small children so it's somewhat chaotic, but I try to get into my little writing studio as often as I can to work on my next book, hopefully more of the same. I love writing and I do it regardless of the success or the lack of success of the book. I do because I want to do it.

So hopefully more writing, more quiet times in my studio, punctuated by laughter and screaming with my children.

Well we're facing a lot of enormous challenges that will require that we change our behavior. We have a society that is incredibly materialistic and there's only so much materialism this planet can take.

So we're going to have to overcome some great challenges which will mean re-thinking how we live, how we travel. Hopefully we're up to it.

I like that it was small, it was intimate. I had easy access to my professors, it was a very convivial informal learning experience.

It's a lovely small University. I love the campus, the main campus. I love the architecture, Ron Thom's architecture is a lovely architecture.

So it was an intimate stimulating experience. Well it taught me how to think, it taught me how to think critically. I had never taken Philosophy before and I actually loved it.

I don't think we can be a --- I don't think someone can be a functioning citizen if they don't know how to think critically. And Trent taught me that, the Department of Philosophy taught me that.

So I met a whole bunch of professors who were very bright, very engaging, very stimulating and it just taught me how to think critically, how to parse through things and get to the essential.

Well when you go to university you're usually a very young person you know, so Trent taught me a little bit about maturity, about social relations. It taught me that I had a choice in life.

You know when you go to high school, it's sort of a, it's quite a regulated environment; you have some choice but it's limited. Once you get to university the choices are enormous so you start discovering who you are, who you want to be in a university milieu, and Trent was a great place for that for me.

I'd tell them that I had a wonderful time there, that it's a good University, close also to a very large city, Toronto, so it has a nice - it's nicely situated in the sense that it's removed from Toronto, it's in it's own environment but it's also close to a big city and all that a big city has to offer. And Peterborough is a charming city in a beautiful area, the Kawarthas are a lovely area...

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