An Evening with Kristin Hannah
Kristin Hannah discusses her novels and her journey as one of America's most beloved fiction writers — from The Nightingale and The Great Alone to The Women.
Why we picked this
Hannah's fiction travels from occupied France to the Alaskan wilderness to Vietnam with consistent emotional precision — an evening to understand how she builds that range and why it reaches so many readers.
Kristin Hannah has spent three decades writing novels about women navigating war, wilderness, and the full weight of history — and her readership has grown from devoted to extraordinary. The Nightingale brought occupied France to life through two sisters’ divergent choices. The Great Alone set survival against the extremes of Alaska. The Women examined the Vietnam War through the experiences of military nurses who came home to a country that didn’t want to acknowledge them.
Her work has generated multiple film and television adaptations, including Netflix’s Firefly Lane, but the books themselves are the original thing — dense with historical research, emotionally unflinching, constructed to make readers feel what the past actually demanded of ordinary people.
A City Arts evening with Hannah is an opportunity to hear how those books get made: the research, the structural choices, the conviction that historical fiction carries a responsibility to the real.