Hisham Matar and Viet Thanh Nguyen on exile, memory, and belonging
Two Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists connect over their latest works and most urgent questions about exile, memory, and the meaning of home.
Why we picked this
Two Pulitzer winners who write from exile — Matar from Libya, Nguyen from Vietnam — in conversation about the questions that define their work: what it means to lose a country and whether writing can recover it.
Hisham Matar and Viet Thanh Nguyen have each built extraordinary literary careers from the experience of displacement. Matar’s writing about Libya and Nguyen’s about Vietnam share a deep engagement with what exile does to memory, identity, and the possibility of return.
This BPL Presents event brings together two writers whose work operates at the highest level of literary craft while never losing sight of the political and human stakes of forced displacement. They’ll discuss their latest works — Matar’s To Save and to Destroy and Nguyen’s My Friends — and the broader questions that unite their very different literary projects.
Free at BPL’s Dweck Center.