Ayad Akhtar in Conversation with Karen Russell
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar joins novelist Karen Russell for a conversation on American identity, the art of fiction, and his body of work.
Why we picked this
Akhtar is one of the few American writers working across both theater and fiction whose work has the same force in each form — having Karen Russell as interlocutor means the conversation will move at the level the work deserves.
Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced became the most produced play in American theater the year after it won the Pulitzer Prize — a single dinner party that unraveled the contradictions of Muslim American assimilation with structural precision and emotional violence. His novel Homeland Elegies extended those preoccupations into a hybrid form that blended memoir with fiction to examine money, identity, and what it costs to become American.
He’s received the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award — recognition that reflects a body of work that moves with purpose across forms and refuses easy resolution. Karen Russell, whose fiction operates in its own register of strangeness and intelligence, is well-suited to draw out the thinking behind the choices.
An evening for readers of both writers, and for anyone interested in what serious literary work about American identity looks like right now.