Speaking Part 2 想見的名人 Band 7+ 範答

Describe a famous person you would like to meet.

You should say:

• who the person is
• what they are famous for
• what you know about them
• and explain why you would like to meet them.

¹ The famous person I'd most like to meet is the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami — I imagine he's on a lot of people's lists, but my reasons are fairly specific. ² He's now in his mid-seventies, has written more than a dozen novels including Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore, and is probably Japan's most translated living writer.

³ I first read Norwegian Wood at nineteen, during my first year at university, and it did something to me that very few books have done since — it made loneliness feel like an ordinary human condition rather than a personal failing. ⁴ I've since read almost everything he's written in translation, including his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which is partly about how he trains for marathons and partly about the discipline required to write a novel.

⁵ If I could meet him, I wouldn't want a literary interview. ⁶ I'd want to ask about the small, concrete habits — what time he gets up, whether he still swims, how he handles the stretches where the writing just isn't going well. ⁷ He's famously private and reportedly quite shy, so I imagine even five minutes of honest conversation would be difficult to come by.

⁸ The deeper reason I want to meet him is that he's one of the few public figures who has written openly about the loneliness of creative work without romanticising it. ⁹ I've spent the last three years trying to write fiction seriously in my spare time, and most of the advice available online is either too vague or too performative. ¹⁰ Five minutes with someone who has done it for forty-five years, who treats writing as a craft rather than a calling, would be worth more than any writing course I could pay for.

The famous person I'd most like to meet is the primatologist Jane Goodall. She's now in her nineties and still travels roughly three hundred days a year to give talks on conservation — which, honestly, is remarkable in itself.

If I could meet any famous person, it would be the retired Taiwanese baseball player Chien-Ming Wang. He was the first Taiwanese pitcher to win a World Series, but the reason I'd want to meet him is actually how he handled his injury and comeback — which got much less coverage than his peak years.

The person I'd most have loved to meet is Anthony Bourdain, the American chef and travel writer, who died in 2018. His show Parts Unknown changed how I think about food and places — he treated food as a way into cultures, not the other way around.