Writers Speak | Laila Lalami in conversation with James Wood
Wednesday, November 13, 2024 at 6:00pm | Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall
About the Speakers:
Laila Lalami is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s, the Guardian, and the New York Times. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles.
James Wood is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard. He has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007. In 2009, he won the National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism. His critical essays are collected in The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays. He is also the author of two novels The Book Against God and Upstate, and a study of technique in the novel, How Fiction Works. His most recent book, Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997-2019, collects the best essays from his career into one definitive volume.
About the Series:
Writers Speak, a series of literary conversations at the Mahindra Humanities Center, is convened by Duncan White, Associate Director in the Program in General Education and Lecturer in History & Literature at Harvard University.