Life of Pi's Yann Martel on His New Novel
Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi, discusses his newest novel in conversation at the Chicago Humanities Festival's Bridgeport Day at the Ramova Theatre.
Why we picked this
Martel has always used fiction to ask what stories do to us — not just what they say. A CHF conversation with him is likely to be as much about the craft and purpose of narrative as any particular book.
Yann Martel is the Canadian author whose novel Life of Pi spent years on international bestseller lists and won the Man Booker Prize in 2002. The novel’s central question — whether the better story is also the true one — established Martel as a writer preoccupied with the philosophy of fiction itself, not merely its execution.
His new novel brings him to the Ramova Theatre for a conversation that promises to explore the ideas animating his latest work. Martel’s appearances are consistently intellectual as well as literary — he has a gift for locating the conceptual pressure points behind his own stories and making them legible to a general audience.
Part of the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Bridgeport Day.