Despite challenges posed by the Covid pandemic, Pulitzer winners in Fiction have been engaging with their readers across the country and around the world. Below, find a list of virtual events they participated in that were recorded, allowing those across time zones to view the videos on their schedules.
For upcoming virtual events, visit the Pulitzer.org events page. To watch videos of 2020 winners across prize categories, click here.
"The Sympathizer" author, 2016 winner and Pulitzer Board member Viet Thanh Nguyen spoke with "The Moor's Account" author and 2015 Pulitzer finalist Laila Lalami via Town Hall Seattle on immigration and the concept of "conditional citizenship."
"Americans, like many other nationalities, have a hard time confronting the complexities and the contradictions of their past," Nguyen said as they discuss the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. "It's not wrong to point out that these contraditions and complexities happened."
"This country, like any other, is built on contradictions. We have freedom and liberty and equality and we have slavery and genocide and colonialism. And the challengr for us is to think of both things existing at the very same time."
"Less" author Andrew Sean Greer, who won the Pulitzer in Fiction in 2018, participated in a conversation with the Brown Club of Greater San Francisco. In it, he touched on aging as a gay man when so many in his community, who now might be older role models to himself and his peers, were lost to a previous epidemic, AIDS.
He spoke to the same sentiment in the pages of "Less," although it's largely a globe-trotting love story. During the interview Greer notes a particular paragraph on getting older. "It's a comedy, but I wanted to think about some of the hardest things and saddest things, and that's where comedy comes from. And so that paragraph is about the saddest thing that I had to live through, which was the AIDS pandemic."
The wide-ranging conversation also includes Greer speaking about singing collegiate a capella as a Jabberwock at Brown Univeristy, the significance of need-blind admissions and diversity, how he learned he had won the Prize, as well as details on his work process.
"Gilead" author and 2005 Fiction winner Marilynne Robinson opens the following recorded conversation by describing a reading project she tackled in her "late, late youth," after finishing graduate school.
"I decided I'd read the books educated people act as though they have read. This was a very ambitious project. The list was long, the matter weighty and complex." She describes her discovery of the nuances of Karl Marx, exploring Sigmund Freud's interest in the forbidden, and more, before delving into the importance of education and higher education especially.
"March" author and 2006 winner Geraldine Brooks spoke to Buffalo's Larkin Square from her home on Martha's Vineyard. The first question asked how she is doing in this time of Covid-19. Brooks responded:
"For me, it's not that different, because usually when you're writing a novel and I'm very deep into one. In fact, I'm coming towards the end of one, you don't get out much, and you never go and get a haircut, or a leg wax or anything like that. You just sit at home and fret over the novel."
However, she went on: "Obviously, you feel the disturbance in the force in all the suffering around you," noting the small size of her local hospital. She also speaks about having her two sons at home at a time she didn't expect them to be there as much.
"A Visit from the Goon Squad" author Jennifer Egan and her interviewer from Akashic Books were neighbors, each social distancing at home in Brooklyn. She talked about potentially contracting the virus but not having been able to get tested earlier in the pandemic.
Asked about her characters who are physically isolated but connected via digital technology, Egan referenced "The Keep," written during the 1990s. She discussed her first-ever email correspondence, in which she was communicating with gay members of the military who were seeking connection with others but struggled to do so openly.
"More and more, we all live in an atmosphere saturated with the possibility of disembodied communication. That's what we do. We wait messaging from outside and in a certain sense, that is a very Gothic landscape."
Some clips cannot be embedded here. Author of "The Underground Railroad" and "The Nickel Boys," two-time winner Colson Whitehead recently appeared on the BBC — click here to watch that interview. "Olive Kitterage" author and 2009 winner Elizabeth Strout's latest virtual interview is viewable here, with registration at Book Passage.
Check the Pulitzer.org events page for more upcoming appearances with Prize winners in journalism, books, drama and music.