Michel Faber (1960) is a Dutch-born Scottish author. His debut novel Under the Skin from 2000 garnered a lot of attention and was nominated for the Whitbread Award. It is a science fiction parable about an alien, masked as a woman named Isserley, luring men to feed her species with their flesh. A visually striking film was made Jonathan Glazer after the novel in 2013, starring Scarlett Johansson as Isserley. The Book of Strange New Things (2014) is a dystopian science fiction novel about a missionary named Peter who is spreading Christianity on a planet called Oasis. This book extends Faber’s imagination to speech, because the world view of the inhabitants of Oasis is not different only in substance, but also in grammar. His collection of short stories The Fahrenheit Twins (2005) also includes surreal stories with unexpected twists. Faber’s stories make you think about the fragility of human life and the artificial nature of identity, as well as the inevitability of simple intimacy. Michel Faber will talk to translator Krista Kaer.