Authors and Poets

What It Takes is a podcast series featuring intimate, revealing conversations with towering figures in almost every field: music, science, sports, politics, film, technology, literature, the military and social justice. These rare interviews have been recorded over the past 25 years by The Academy of Achievement. They offer the life stories and reflections of people who have had a huge impact on the world, and insights you can apply to your own life. Subscribe to the What It Takes podcast series at iTunes.com/WhatItTakes

Hailed as the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world, South Africa's Athol Fugard has won international praise for creating theater of "power, glory, and majestic language." In more than 20 plays, written over six decades, he has chronicled the struggles of men and women of all races for dignity and human fulfillment. Born and raised in the Eastern Cape, he founded a multiracial theater company in the 1950s in defiance of the South African government's apartheid system. When he and a black colleague appeared as mixed-race brothers in his play The Blood Knot, it was closed after a single performance. In the 1960s, his work found an audience in other English-speaking countries, but after he appeared in The Blood Knot on BBC Television, the government seized his passport. Since the downfall of the apartheid system, Fugard has been honored by his country's government and by critics and audiences the world over. An Honorary Fellow of Britain's Royal Society of Literature, in 2001 he received Broadway's Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. His novel Tsotsi was adapted into the film of the same name, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film of 2006. He has appeared as an actor in the feature films Gandhi and The Killing Fields. In 2014, he returned to the stage for the first time in 15 years to act in his play Shadow of the Hummingbird at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. In this podcast, recorded at the 2014 International Achievement Summit in San Francisco, he speaks of his youth in South Africa and his early adventures as a merchant seaman. Rather than dwelling on the persecution he suffered as an advocate of racial equality in his country, he focuses on the most basic and satisfying emotions that have informed his life, including the love of other human beings and of nature.

Vocalist, composer and instrumentalist Esperanza Spalding fell in love with music as a little girl in Portland, Oregon. She first drew acclaim as a child violinist before discovering the upright bass as a teenager. Within months she was playing in local clubs, exploring pop, rock, hip-hop and especially jazz. By age 20 she was an instructor at Boston's prestigious Berklee College of Music, and was performing with singer Patti Austin and a stellar roster of jazz greats. Her 2008 album Esperanza topped Billboard's Contemporary Jazz chart. The following year, she was invited to perform at the White House and the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Stockholm. At the 53rd annual Grammy Awards, she was honored as Best New Artist of the Year. With her 2011 album Chamber Music Society, she became the bestselling contemporary jazz artist in the world. On the follow-up, Radio Music Society, she played her own compositions alongside an eclectic selection of tunes by everyone from the Beach Boys to one of her heroes, jazz great Wayne Shorter. In this podcast, recorded at the 2014 International Achievement Summit in San Francisco, Esperanza Spalding performs solo, and in duet with Wayne Shorter. Excerpts from her interview with the Academy of Achievement are interspersed with highlights of that performance.

The most successful and admired female songwriter in the history of pop music, Carole King proves that one woman alone at the piano can be more powerful than a four-piece rock band or a 30-piece orchestra. She grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where her mother was a teacher and her father a firefighter. She learned to play the piano at age four and formed her first band in high school. At age 18, she scored her first Number One hit record ’Ŭ the first of 118 pop hits on the Billboard charts, including such classics as ’źWill You Love Me Tomorrow,’Ź ’źThe Loco-Motion,’Ź ’źUp on the Roof,’Ź It’Ŵs Too Late, Baby,’Ź ’źI Feel the Earth Move Under My Feet,’Ź ’źYou Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman’Ź and ’źYou’Ŵve Got a Friend.’Ź To date, she has recorded 25 solo albums, the most successful of which, Tapestry, sold 25 million copies, and for a quarter of a century held the record for a female artist for most weeks at the top of the charts. The recipient of the 2013 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2013 Gershwin Prize, she is a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. For more than a half century, she has given voice to her innermost truth, and struck a resounding chord in the hearts of listeners around the world. Composer and performer, author and activist, she has brought the same passion, courage and unyielding honesty to her life, to her work, and to her defense of the woods and wildlife of her beloved Rocky Mountains. Carol King received the Gold Medal of the Academy of Achievement in a ceremony at the Academy's headquarters in Washington, D.C. on February 12, 2014. In this podcast, recorded on that occasion, Carole King discusses her life and career. Her remarks are interspersed with excerpts from her performance at the Academy earlier that evening.

This autumn, Natasha Trethewey took up her duties as United States Poet Laureate, the 19th poet to serve since Congress created the position in 1985. Also known as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the Laureate is responsible for all the public poetry programs of the Library, as well as an annual lecture and reading. With her appointment as Poet Laureate, Trethewey crowns a career steeped in the complexities of American history. The marriage of her white, Canadian-born father and her African American mother was still illegal in Mississippi, where she was born, on Confederate Memorial Day, in 1966, although the Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage the following year. Her parents divorced when she was young; she grew up with her mother in Georgia, spending summers with her grandmother in Mississippi and her father in New Orleans. When Natasha was 19, her mother was murdered by her second husband. In Trethewey’Ŵs words, ’źI turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened.’Ź Trethewey’Ŵs poetry is unique for the manner in which she fuses historical materials and vernacular language with traditional verse forms. In Bellocq’Ŵs Ophelia, she imagines the inner life of an anonymous prostitute immortalized by the New Orleans photographer E.J. Bellocq. In 2007, she received the Pulitzer Prize for her book Native Guard, a verse narrative inspired by a black regiment of the Union Army during the Civil War.

Louise Glück is “a strong and haunting presence” among America’s greatest living poets. Her work is distinguished by a rare ability to deploy ostensibly simple language to evoke powerful emotion. While many of her poems clearly address the challenges of life and love in the contemporary world, they are at times informed by the themes and landscapes of classical mythology. She has published 12 volumes of verse to date, including The Seven Ages, Vita Novo, Triumph of Achilles and Averno. Her book The Wild Iris received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She has since received virtually every other major award for poetry, including the Bollingen Prize in 2001 for her lifetime achievement. In 2003, she was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. Born in New York City, she began writing at an early age. She studied at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia University, and although she never took a degree herself, she has spent much of her life teaching in universities. For 20 years, she taught at Williams College in Massachusetts. She now teaches in the creative writing program at Boston University and is the Rosencranz Writer in Residence at Yale University. Her 2009 book, A Village Life, is a collection of dramatic vignettes of everyday life in an unnamed Mediterranean community, where an ancient way of life, governed by the seasons, is gradually giving way to the pressures of modernity. A comprehensive collection, Poems 1962-2012, will appear this November.

With the release of his debut album in 1972, Jackson Browne joined the elite rank of American singer-songwriters who shaped the musical ethos of an era. He captured the mood of the 1970s with the introspective songs on his albums Late For the Sky and The Pretender, as well as his greatest success, the classic road album Running On Empty. At the end of the decade he emerged as a highly visible social activist, co-founder of MUSE (Musicians for Safe Energy). His interest in global issues of the environment, human rights and social justice came to the fore in his albums of the 1980s, including Lives In the Balance and World In Motion. Over the course of his career, he has sold in excess of 17 million albums in the United States alone, and has been inducted into the both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriter's Hall of Fame. In January 2011, Jackson Browne received the Gold Medal of the Academy of Achievement. He performs a solo version of one of his signature songs, "Take It Easy," in this podcast, recorded on that occasion in Washington D.C.

For over 60 years, Hal David (1921-2012) wrote the words America loves to sing. His career spanned the decades from the swing era to the age of hip-hop and took him from Hollywood to Broadway to Nashville. He wrote his first hit song in 1947 and continued to score hits throughout the 1950s, writing for artists as varied as Marty Robbins, Perry Como and Sarah Vaughan. In the 1960s, his partnership with composer Burt Bacharach produced an incomparable series of pop classics such as ’źDon’Ŵt Make Me Over,’Ź ’źWhat the World Needs Now’Ź and ’źDo You Know the Way to San Jose.’Ź Bacharach and David enjoyed some of their biggest hits with singer Dionne Warwick, the ideal interpreter of Bacharach’Ŵs music and Hal David’Ŵs lyrics. Simultaneously with their reign over the pop charts, Bacharach and David enjoyed success in Hollywood and on Broadway, winning an Oscar for their song ’źRaindrops Keep Falling On My Head’Ź from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and writing the score for the hit Broadway musical Promises, Promises, with its signature song ’źI’Ŵll Never Fall In Love Again.’Ź In the years that followed, Hal David crafted hit songs with other composers in a variety of genres, including country hits for singers such as Ronnie Milsap. David scored an international crossover hit with ’źTo All the Girls I’Ŵve Loved Before,’Ź sung by Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias. In every decade, in every style, his lyrics captured the humor and the whimsy, the passions and the sorrows -- the romance of American life. Born in New York City, Hal David died in Los Angeles at the age of 91. In 2010, the Academy of Achievement honored Hal David as the Dean of American Songwriters. In this podcast, recorded on that occasion, he is joined onstage by a dear friend, the premier interpreter of his songs, Dionne Warwick.

America's greatest living chronicler of men at war, Rick Atkinson draws on an intimate knowledge of the soldier's life. The son of a career army officer, he was born in Germany and grew up on military posts. He developed his mastery of research -- along with his powerful prose style and keen eye for the telling detail -- as a reporter for The Kansas City Times and The Washington Post. In 1982, he was honored, along with the rest of the Kansas City newsroom team, with a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting. The same year, he received an individual Pulitzer for national reporting. Among the articles cited by the prize jury were a series he wrote on the West Point class of 1966. Atkinson later elaborated this story in his bestselling book, The Long Gray Line. Since 1983, he has worked for The Washington Post, covering everything from election campaigns and the savings and loan scandal to the wars in Bosnia and Somalia. His reporting on the 1991 conflict with Iraq resulted in the book Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War. As editor in charge of investigations, he brought the paper a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1999 with a series of stories on police shootings in the District of Columbia. Atkinson accompanied General David Petraeus and the 101st Airborne as an embedded reporter in the first months of the Iraq war. He distilled these experiences in the book In the Company of Soldiers, hailed as the most vivid depiction yet written of the day-to-day experience of combat soldiers in Iraq. Last year, he returned to Iraq and Afghanistan to investigate the impact of roadside bombs in the two conflicts. Between assignments in Afghanistan and Iraq, Atkinson is writing an exhaustively researched history of the U.S. armed forces in the European theater of World War II. The first book, An Army at Dawn, was widely praised as the definitive account of the North African campaign and received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for History. The second acclaimed volume, The Day of Battle, focusing on the Italian campaign, was published in 2007. He is now at work on the third volume of his trilogy, recounting the liberation of Western Europe.

America's greatest living chronicler of men at war, Rick Atkinson draws on an intimate knowledge of the soldier's life. The son of a career army officer, he was born in Germany and grew up on military posts. He developed his mastery of research -- along with his powerful prose style and keen eye for the telling detail -- as a reporter for The Kansas City Times and The Washington Post. In 1982, he was honored, along with the rest of the Kansas City newsroom team, with a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting. The same year, he received an individual Pulitzer for national reporting. Among the articles cited by the prize jury were a series he wrote on the West Point class of 1966. Atkinson later elaborated this story in his bestselling book, The Long Gray Line. Since 1983, he has worked for The Washington Post, covering everything from election campaigns and the savings and loan scandal to the wars in Bosnia and Somalia. His reporting on the 1991 conflict with Iraq resulted in the book Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War. As editor in charge of investigations, he brought the paper a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1999 with a series of stories on police shootings in the District of Columbia. Atkinson accompanied General David Petraeus and the 101st Airborne as an embedded reporter in the first months of the Iraq war. He distilled these experiences in the book In the Company of Soldiers, hailed as the most vivid depiction yet written of the day-to-day experience of combat soldiers in Iraq. Last year, he returned to Iraq and Afghanistan to investigate the impact of roadside bombs in the two conflicts. Between assignments in Afghanistan and Iraq, Atkinson is writing an exhaustively researched history of the U.S. armed forces in the European theater of World War II. The first book, An Army at Dawn, was widely praised as the definitive account of the North African campaign and received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for History. The second acclaimed volume, The Day of Battle, focusing on the Italian campaign, was published in 2007. He is now at work on the third volume of his trilogy, recounting the liberation of Western Europe.

In Part 1 of this podcast, recorded in the Boulders Lodge of the Singita Sabi Sands Game Reserve during the 2009 International Achievement Summit, Alexander McCall Smith recounts the experiences that inspired the No. 1 Ladies books and reads aloud from the first novel in the series.

Born and raised in South Africa, Nadine Gordimer published her first short story in a children's magazine in 1937 at the age of 16. She left college without a degree and continued publishing short fiction in South African journals. She drew attention outside her country in 1951, when her stories began appearing in The New Yorker magazine. She published her first novel, The Lying Days in 1953. In her short stories and novels such as Burger's Daughter and July's People, she explored the distortions imposed on ordinary human relationships by oppressive social systems like that of apartheid in South Africa. The infamous Sharpeville massacre of 1960 drove the author into political activism. She joined the African National Congress while it was still listed as an illegal organization by the government. While her fiction was repeatedly banned by the South African government it received the highest acclaim abroad. She won Britain's most distinguished literary award the Booker Prize for her 1974 novel The Conservationist. In 1991 she received the Nobel Prize for Literature, in recognition of her "magnificent epic writing’Ķ of very great benefit to humanity." While she has traveled widely to lecture and teach she continues to make her home in South Africa. In this podcast, recorded at the 2009 International Achievement Summit in Cape Town, Nadine Gordimer discusses the relationship between the image and the word in a multimedia age, the challenges of achieving universal literacy in the developing nations, and the enduring power of the written word.

The poet and playwright Wole Soyinka is a towering figure in world literature. He has won international acclaim for his verse, as well as for novels such as The Interpreters. His work in the theater ranges from the early comedy The Lion and the Jewel to the poetic tragedy Death and the King's Horseman. Born in Nigeria, he returned from graduate studies in England just as his country attained its independence from Britain. Many of his plays, including Kongi's Harvest and Madmen and Specialists, are bitter satires on the dictatorships of post-colonial Africa. In the late '60s, his opposition to a repressive regime in his own country led to his imprisonment in solitary confinement for nearly two years, an experience he reflects on in the memoir The Man Died and the verse collection A Shuttle in the Crypt. His works in all genres deploy a rich poetic language, steeped in European mythology and the Yoruba spiritual traditions of West Africa, interests he fused in his masterful study Myth, Literature and the African World. In 1986, he became the first African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In Part 2 of this podcast, recorded in the Boulders Lodge of the Singita Sabi Sands Game Reserve during the 2009 International Achievement Summit, Alexander McCall Smith takes questions from the Academy of Achievement's student delegates, touching on the craft of fiction and his occasionally baffling interactions with the film industry.

Taylor Swift attended the International Achievement Summit as a student delegate in 2008. In Part 1 of this video excerpt from her performance at the Summit, she sings her hits "Our Song" and "Tim McGraw."

Taylor Swift attended the International Achievement Summit as a student delegate in 2008. In Part 2 of this video excerpt from her performance at the Summit, she sings "Teardrops on My Guitar" and "Picture to Burn"

The songs Brian Wilson created as leader of the Beach Boys combined the rhythms of rock and roll with Baroque counterpoint and jazz harmony to create an exhilarating sound that has become the perennial soundtrack of the American summer. Despite near deafness in one ear, Brian Wilson began experimenting with music and tape recorders as a teenager in Hawthorne, California. Forming the Beach Boys with his two younger brothers, a cousin, and a neighbor, he recorded their first single at home while his parents were out of town. The song was called ո‡Surfin',ո‡ and it made the Beach Boys a national sensation. A succession of hit singles and albums followed. In the mid-'60s, the Beach Boys' sound became increasingly complex with dense, layered hits like ո‡California Girlsո‡ and "Good Vibrations," repeatedly voted the greatest single of all time. Despite the rapturous sounds he created, Brian Wilson suffered from deep depression and spent many years hiding from the world while the Beach Boys continued to perform without him. As Wilson made a slow, painful recovery, he was confronted with the loss of both his brothers. By 1998, Brian Wilson had overcome his demons and embarked on a sold-out concert tour. Today, he is once again composing, recording and touring the world with an ace band of young musicians. His achievements as musician, songwriter, arranger and producer continue to this day, and his work exerts a powerful influence on musicians not yet born when he recorded his first hits. This podcast was recorded during Brian Wilson's performance at the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Hawaii.

The brilliant novelist, poet and literary innovator Michael Ondaatje was born on the island nation of Ceylon (now the independent republic of Sri Lanka) to parents of Indian and Dutch descent. When Ondaatje was nine his parents separated, and his mother took him, along with his brother and sister, to England. At 19, Ondaatje immigrated to Canada; he has since become a Canadian citizen. Ondaatje first won recognition as a poet. His collected poems, There's a Trick With a Knife I'm Learning to Do, won the Governor-General's Award, Canada's highest literary prize, in 1979. He moved from poetry to fiction with unconventional books such as The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Coming Through Slaughter, combining prose and poetry, fact and fiction, text and image. His masterpiece, The English Patient, is an epic romantic tragedy, set in Egypt and Italy during the Second World War. This novel pierced the hearts of readers around the world and received the Booker Prize, the highest literary honor in the British Commonwealth. The 1996 film adaptation received nine Oscars, including the year's prize for Best Picture.

Khaled Hosseini's novel, The Kite Runner, has become an international publishing phenomenon and a modern classic. This tale of childhood innocence betrayed, set against three tragic decades in the history of Afghanistan, gave readers around the world an insight into the human truth behind the headlines. This unforgettable book is the product of Khaled Hosseini's own life experience. Born in Afghanistan, his family fled to the United States when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. In the U.S. Khaled Hosseini became a successful physician, but he longed to tell the world something of the life he knew before his country was consumed by war. He rose at four o'clock every morning to work on The Kite Runner before a full day of seeing patients. Following the enormous success of his first book, a second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, soon joined it on the bestseller lists. In addition to his thriving literary career, Dr. Hosseini now serves as a special envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, assisting displaced persons in war zones around the world. In this podcast, recorded at the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, he reflects on the journey that led him from his homeland of Afghanistan to exile in the United States, through the process of learning a new language in his teens and becoming a doctor and an author.

"F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. I think I've proved him wrong. And all because I refused to settle for a one-act existence, the 30 years I taught English in various New York City high schools." Frank McCourt was already retired when he published his first book at age 66. Angela's Ashes, a memoir of his impoverished boyhood in Limerick, Ireland, shot to the top of the best-seller lists and remained there for over a year. Angela's Ashes won McCourt the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. It was still topping the paperback lists when McCourt's second book 'Tis hit the bookstores, and the best-seller lists. A third bestseller, Teacher Man, recounts his years teaching in the New York City public schools. "After retiring from teaching I wanted a second act, not a rocker in Florida," McCourt says. After a lifetime of helping young people find their own voices, Frank McCourt has found his own, and millions of readers have found a friend to treasure.