Writers Speak | Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah in conversation with Laura van den Berg

Writers Speak | Nana Kwame Adjei Brenyah in conversation with Laura van den Berg
Wednesday, October 30, 2024, 6:00pm | Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall
About the Speakers:
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah was raised in Spring Valley, New York, and now lives in the Bronx. His debut collection, Friday Black, was a New York Times bestseller, won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. His first novel Chain-Gang All-Stars was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Books Are My Bag Awards, and selected as a New York Times Top Ten Books of the Year. Adjei-Brenyah is a National Book Foundation’s "5 Under 35" honoree.
Laura van den Berg is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Harvard University. She is the author of seven works of fiction, including The Third Hotel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bard Fiction Prize, an O. Henry Award, and has twice been shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her new novel, State of Paradise, was published by FSG in the summer of 2024.
About the Series:
Writers Speak, a series of literary conversations at the Mahindra Humanities Center, is convened by Duncan White, Associate Director in the Program in General Education and Lecturer in History & Literature at Harvard University.