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THE HUNGER GAMES

Interview With the Author


Here are select interviews with Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins:


Writing in The New Yorker last year, Laura Miller suggested that “The Hunger Games” is most coherent when read as “a fever-dream allegory of the adolescent social experience”: doesn’t everything feel like life or death on the battlefield known as the high-school cafeteria? Many of Collins’s fans surely see “The Hunger Games” through this prism (one children’s-bookstore owner told me the books would be a good tool for teachers broaching the subject of popularity). For protective parents, reading “The Hunger Games” as an allegory of adolescence rather than of war may be more comfortable. But this is not a theory that appeals to Collins. “I don’t write about adolescence,” she said. “I write about war. For adolescents.”
"What inspired you to write [The Hunger Games]?
One night, I was lying in bed, and I was channel surfing between reality TV programs and actual war coverage. On one channel, there’s a group of young people competing for I don’t even know; and on the next, there’s a group of young people fighting in an actual war. I was really tired, and the lines between these stories started to blur in a very unsettling way. That’s the moment when Katniss’s story came to me."

Q: What do you hope readers will come away with when they read The Hunger Games and/or Catching Fire?
A: Questions about how elements of the book might be relevant in their own lives. And, if they’re disturbing, what they might do about them.
Q: What were some of your favorite novels when you were a teen?
A: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Boris by Jaapter Haar
Germinal by Emile Zola
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

More video interviews with Scholastic.