Politics and the Novel – New York Festival
The writers Yiyun Li, Valeria Luiselli, and Viet Thanh Nguyen on fiction inspired by fact. Moderated by Parul Sehgal.
Yiyun Li is the author of two collections of short stories, four novels, and two works of nonfiction; her books include the memoir “Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life” and “Where Reasons End: A Novel.” She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and is a winner of the Windham-Campbell Prize, among other awards. She has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 2003. She teaches at Princeton University.
Valeria Luiselli is the author of the essay collection “Sidewalks” and the nonfiction book “Tell Me How It Ends,” as well as the novels “Faces in the Crowd,” “The Story of My Teeth,” and “Lost Children Archive.” She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of an Andrew Carnegie Medal, the Dublin Literary Award, and an American Book Award. She is a professor at Bard College.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel “The Sympathizer” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is a sequel to “The Sympathizer,” “The Committed.” He is a professor at the University of Southern California. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, he is also the author of the short-story collection “The Refugees” and the nonfiction book “Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.”
Parul Sehgal is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She was previously a book critic at the New York Times, where she also worked as a senior editor and columnist. She has won the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing and a New York Press Club Award for Critical Arts Review. She teaches in the creative-writing graduate program at New York University.
