Photo Collage: MOA Staff; (Source: Olivier Favre) Facebook Twitter LinkedIn

Master storyteller Ken Follett’s latest novel, The Armor of Light, is the fifth volume in his epic historical fiction series that began with the 1989 bestseller The Pillars of the Earth. The

English author, 74, recently attended a state dinner hosted by France’s President Emmanuel Macron for King Charles III, held in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. He shares

some of the evening’s star-studded details, as well as his dream dinner party guests, favorite authors and advice for aspiring writers. 

Something scary is happening and the reader is sitting on the edge of the chair. Something sad happens and tears come to the reader’s eyes. We put our characters through all these trials,

and we write about how they feel. If the reader doesn’t feel emotionally about the story, it’s not going to be a bestseller. It’s not going to be a good novel. There’s no reason to read that

book if you don’t care what happens to the people. I think that’s the most important thing — to make sure that the reader really cares profoundly, emotionally about what’s happening in this

story. If you think about books that you’ve read and enjoyed, it’s always all about the emotion.

What advice would you give to an aspiring young author?

The important thing you have to do is read a lot, because you learn so much about a novel. Every author I know was an avid reader from a very young age, and they all continue to be readers.

That’s how you learn about a chapter, a paragraph, a sentence, how you learn to describe landscape, how to do dialogue, how to do a cliff-hanger. When you start to write your first novel,

you have an enormous amount of knowledge about what a novel takes.