Christian Nikolaus Opitz

What was your favorite book as a child?

Probably Astrid Lindgren’s Bullerby trilogy, especially the first volume, All About the Bullerby Children. I think I liked the simplicity of the stories, taken from everyday life and, as I know now, loosely based on Lindgren’s memories of her own childhood in rural Sweden. But I also liked the tension between the strange and the familiar that I found in those books. The Bullerby stories are set in the early twentieth century, and reading them as a child in the 1980s I was very aware that they described a bygone era, a lost world, if you will. But living in a small village myself, I was still very much surrounded by the remnants of that world. My great-grandmother and some of my friends’ grandparents were still living in old farmhouses that didn’t have running water, and every now and again you’d see an old farmer drive down the village streets in a horse-drawn wagon. So for all its old-fashioned otherness, the world of Bullerby was still highly relatable to me.

What was the original reason or motivation why you started writing creatively?

To tell the truth, I don’t know. It’s just something I’ve always wanted to do, even as a child. I was writing poetry all through my teenage years and well into my twenties, and even got some of it published. Then, however, I got swamped up in an academic career as an art historian and, without really noticing it, I stopped writing creatively altogether. But since my main area of research is the art of the Middle Ages, my academic work eventually led me to Simon Armitage’s translation of the fourteenth-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and through that, I started to engage with Armitage’s own work as a poet. This brought me back to poetry and made me realize I still had the urge to write something beyond academic prose.

What was the most adventurous or thrilling thing you ever did/experienced?

I’m not exactly a thrill-seeking person, so I’ll have to go with something small. Some years ago I stayed up late one August night to watch the Perseid meteor shower. The effect was rather unexpected. Every time I saw a shooting star it felt like the entire sky had come loose and started moving. And even though I was standing perfectly still I was overcome by a sense of vertigo, as if the ground beneath my feet was moving too, and in that moment it seemed as if all the certainties in the world were gone. So maybe not something small after all, but still something rather mundane you can easily do at home. All you need is a window, preferably a skylight, and a major astronomical event.

Do you listen to music while reading or writing?

I used to, but the older I get, the more I prefer silence. Occasionally I will still put on something instrumental that’s not too distracting — e. g. the Gamba Suites of Marin Marais — but even those occasions are becoming rarer and rarer.