Video / Audio  Writing

Uzodinma Iweala, MD, is the author of the multi-award-winning novel Beasts of No Nation (prizes from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Public Library, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Booktrust) and of the non-fiction Our Kind of People: Thoughts on HIV/AIDS in Nigeria (2012). In 2007 he was selected as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. Dr. Iweala will read from his latest work, Speak No Evil –which he describes as a “a series of interlinked narratives set in Washington, DC that explores the themes of choice, freedom, and what we must compromise to live in a secure society.”

The award-winning novelist, essayist, lyricist, and screenwriter Nick Hornby visits the Heyman Center.  Among his many bestselling novels are About a Boy, High Fidelity, and Juliet, Naked.   Serving as interlocutor will be poet and Barnard professor Saskia Hamilton.

David Henry Hwang, Tony award-winning playwright of such plays as M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, Golden Child, and Chinglish, visited Columbia to discuss his work, including Kung Fu (inspired by the life of Bruce Lee), which will premiere this spring at the Signature Theatre Company. Joining him in conversation was theater director and Columbia professor Gregory Mosher, former head of both the Lincoln Center and Goodman Theatres, and Jean Howard, George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia and a prominent theater scholar.

David Henry Hwang, Tony award-winning playwright of such plays as M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, Golden Child, and Chinglish, visited Columbia to discuss his work with Jean Howard and Gregory Mosher.

Acclaimed authors Justin Torres and Marie Myung-Ok Lee, both of whom write about the American immigrant experience, will discuss their work with the novelist Ellis Avery.

This Writing Lives event featured Hisham Matar, author of the Man Booker shortlisted novel In the Country of Men, and more recently, Anatomy of a Disappearance.   In addition to reading from his work, Hisham Matar spoke with Bashir-Abu Manneh of Barnard College on the topic of "Literature, Exile, and the 'Arab Spring."

Renowned author Jamaica Kincaid gave a reading, followed by an interview with Saidiya Hartman, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, visited the Heyman Center where he spoke with Andreas Huyssen, Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Columbia University.