Michael Cunningham, author of "The Hours", and Yann Martel, author of "Life of Pi", expressed their discontent with the administration of Donald Trump, President of the United States, and with the voters who re-elected him. The discussion took place yesterday, October 16, 2026, at the FÓLIO festival, in Óbidos.
"I hope the world lasts long enough for this to become a memory," observed Cunningham.
"I hope the world lasts long enough for this to become a memory," observed Cunningham.
Asked about the reasons why over 70 million people vote for a man "incompetent, corrupt, and unworthy", Cunningham confessed to being "stupefied and horrified" by the situation in the United States. "The fact that this is the will of the majority of Americans is also worrying," he stated, suggesting that Artificial Intelligence contributes to the manipulation of voters who continue to support Donald Trump, spreading ideas such as "dark-skinned people will steal their jobs".
Yann Martel considered it easy to "demonize and insult" Trump, but recalled that he was elected twice by millions of voters. "We have to think about why they voted for him, just as they voted for Barack Obama before. It's a dysfunctional democratic society," he observed. Martel added that Trump "speaks to dissatisfied people, unemployed people, or those who work very hard, and says he wants to make America great again, but he is lying".
Martel also commented on social disparity, mentioning that Elon Musk, the world's richest man, presented a "flying car" from Tesla. The writer expressed the hope that the current vice-president, J. D. Vance, will not be elected after Trump's departure. "I wish a woman had won the election. Hillary Clinton is much smarter than Trump, but she was more associated with the system. It's a shame it wasn't Bernie Sanders, as he would have left the United States in a better situation," he assured.
The author of "Life of Pi", published in 2001, awarded the Man Booker Prize and adapted into a film in 2012, explained that the work originated from the question of how people can still believe in God. "Writing is always about answering a question," he said. Martel, who did not have a Christian education, learned about Jesus through Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea". His first book sold 800 copies, while "Life of Pi" sold millions, and he loves all his four children equally.
Michael Cunningham, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999 with "The Hours", a novel that tells the lives of three women from different eras linked to Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway", argued that "most novels are an attempt to record time, feeling, to try to retrieve something that no longer exists". "All writers feel they have failed internally, because they know something is missing, but it is important to keep writing about everything."
