Described by Richard Flanagan as the “best American novel I’ve read in years”, Pulitzer Prize-winner Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies combines memoir and essay, fact and fiction to deliver a tour de force.  How, his narrator asks, can he “express the complex, often contradictory alchemy at work in translating experience into art?”.  This powerful, courageous and extraordinarily timely work is his answer, exploring not just the state of contemporary America in the Trump era, and the relationship between East and West, but searing questions of identity, family and art.

Chaired by Ben Brooker