Newly awarded 2017 Pulitzer Prize winning authors Colson Whitehead and Hisham Matar and Man Booker Prize winning Irish author Anne Enright will kick off Adelaide Writers' Week's 2017 out-of-season events program with three special evenings in May.
Adelaide Writers' Week Director Laura Kroetsch said: "It is such a coup to have two Pulitzer Prize winners on the program for our first series of special events for 2017. This series takes up the themes of family, love, loss and the quest for freedom, and brings together three writers from around the world to discuss their award-winning books that will take readers from a small town in Ireland, to Qaddafi's Libya to the American Civil War."
Fresh from his 2017 Pulitzer Prize win for Fiction for The Underground Railroad, announced on Tuesday, celebrated American novelist Colson Whitehead comes to Adelaide on Sunday May 28 for a conversation about history, his early career and what it's like to be chosen by Oprah.
A New York Times number one best seller and National Award winner, The Underground Railroad became one of the biggest hits of 2016 after
Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club. It tells the story of young slave Cora's desperate journey to escape from a cotton plantation in Georgia on the eve of the American Civil War. Her escape is via the legendary, albeit desperately risky "underground railroad", here imagined as a secret network of racks and tunnels underneath the American South, a journey that promises freedom.
Whitehead is also the author of The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist,
John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and one collection of essays, The Colossus of New York.
Awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for his extraordinary memoir The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between, Libyan author Hisham Matar comes to Adelaide on Monday May 29.
When Matar was 19 and studying in England, his father was kidnapped in Qaddafi's Libya. He never saw him again, nor did he ever give up hope that he would. The Return tells the story of Matar's return to his homeland 22 years later to search for him.
Named one of the top books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian, The Return is the third novel for Matar, whose 2006 debut In the Country of Men was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US and won six international literary awards including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best First Book award for Europe and South Asia, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and the inaugural Arab American Book Award.
Join this gifted author for a conversation about his brilliant portrait of a nation and a people on the cusp of change, and a family negotiating love and loss.
Appointed the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction in 2015, Dublin based author Anne Enright comes to Adelaide on Monday May 22 for a conversation about her new novel The Green Road, a moving exploration of family relationships hailed as "virtuosic" by the London Telegraph.
Set in a small town on Ireland's Atlantic Coast, the novel spans 30 years and tells the story of Rosaleen, the matriarch of a family forever on the cusp of coming together or falling apart. After her four children have long left, Rosaleen decides to sell the family home and divide the proceeds, a promise that brings the family together for one final Christmas.
It is the sixth novel for Enright, whose previous works include The Gathering, which won both the Man Booker Prize and the Irish Fiction Award in 2007, and was named Irish Novel of the Year, and The Forgotten Waltz (2004), which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Join this award-winning writer for a conversation about personal histories.
Each session will last an hour and will be followed by a book signing.
Tickets for these three events will be on sale at
adelaidefestival.com.au from Thursday, April 13.
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