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Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference
Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference episodes
- MICHAEL POLLAN’S JOURNEY INTO CONSCIOUSNESS
In this episode of Beyond the Page, Michael Pollan talks to Sun Valley Writers Conference Literary Director John Burnham Schwartz about his bestselling book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness. For over three decades we have been the beneficiaries of Pollan’s indefatigable curiosity about everything from food and farming to mind-altering drugs. Now comes his provocative and personal look into consciousness itself and what makes us human.
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33 min - Ruth Reichl – The Paris Novel
RUTH REICHL, one of our best-known and most
well-loved food writers, is the author of five memoirs, including Tender at the Bone and Save Me the Plums. But she is also a captivating novelist, and, as you might imagine, her fiction is full of sensory pleasures. In Reichl’s “The Paris Novel”, the protagonist Stella is left with an unusual inheritance from her mother: a one-way planeticket and a note reading simply, "Go to Paris." But Stella ishardly cut out for adventure; a traumatic childhood has confined her to the strict routines of her comfort zone. In a conversation with fellow food writer ALEKSANDRA CRAPANZANO, recorded live at the 2025 WritersConference, Reichl speaks about her novel that celebrates the city they both adore, and the many reasons for living deliciously, taking chances, and findingyour true home.Photo Credit - Shannon Greer
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33 min - Dan Jones - WHAT THE MIDDLE AGES HAS DONE FOR THE MODERN WORLD
Did you know that Edward III’s last parliament invented impeachment? That cancel culture in universities actually began at Oxford and in Paris in the 14th Century? That Edward II’s parties would have made Diddy’s freak-offs look like kindergarten parties by comparison? And then there’s the Magna Carta, which supposedly limited the power of the monarchy and established the principle that everyone, including the king, is subject to the law. In this episode – recorded live at the 2025 conference – bestselling British historian Dan Jones, author of such books as The Plantagenets, The Templars, and Henry V, and host
of the podcast This Is History, brings us in riveting fashion into the weirdly prescient now of the Middle Ages.Photo credit: Ray J. Gadd
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34 min - SALMAN RUSHDIE: WRITER IN THE WORLD
In this episode, recorded live at the 2025 Conference, Salman Rushdie, having received the Sun Valley Writers'
Conference Writer in the World Prize, talks with his fellow novelist and great friend Colum McCann.Rushdie is a writer who needs no introduction: his name has long been recognized around the world for his brilliant writing and his unfailing courage in defending freedom of speech. He was honored for his extraordinary body of work, both fiction and non-fiction – including his memoir Knife:Meditations after an Attempted Murder, his account of the attempt on his life in August of 2022 and how the love of his wife, the writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths, helped him to survive – and for continuing to write in the face of immeasurable opposition and danger.
Salman Rushdie is many remarkable things, but above all, and always, he is a writer and a teller of stories, and a master at that.
*Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
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33 min - EVAN OSNOS: “The Haves and Have-Yachts”
In this episode of Beyond the Page, recorded live at the 2025 Writers Conference, New Yorker staff writer and National Book Award-winning author Evan Osnos dives into the bold-faced, always entertaining, and all too timely topic
of how much is too much in our society—or rather, how much is never enough? Such is the question for the billionaires who now make up America’s ultrarich. Their giant yachts, luxury compounds—and, oh yes, tax schemes—are a source of endless, if alarming, fascination. Osnos talks about his bestselling book The Haves and Have-Yachts and the acquisitive appetites and habits of our new “oligarchs” and how their outsized fortunes are allowing them to hold sway over the elections and the economy.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
32 min - Doris Kearns Goodwin: “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s”
BEYOND THE PAGE
Doris Kearns Goodwin: “An Unfinished Love
Story: A Personal History of the 1960s”In this episode – recorded live at the 2025
Writers Conference – Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of America’s most acclaimed and beloved historians, chronicles her and her late husband Richard's experiences working with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson during the tumultuous 1960s, using personal archives to explore pivotal moments and their own relationship. Her bestselling book, “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s,” offers an intimate, up-close look at figures like JFK,LBJ, and RFK, weaving together their personal lives with major events like the Civil Rights Movement. But the heart of this wonderful, deeply moving memoir is unquestionably the enduring bond of mutual love and respect between husband and wife across the decades, a bond that embraces their differences as much as their similarities. “Dick was more interested in shaping history,” Doris has said, “and I in figuring out how history was shaped.”Photo credit – © 2024 AE Television Networks LLCLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
30 min - Ocean Vuong "The Emperor of Gladness"
In this episode – recorded live at the 2025 Writers Conference – I have an intimate conversation, in front of 1500 people, with the novelist and poet Ocean Vuong. When he was two years old, in 1990, Ocean immigrated with his family from Vietnam. They settled in East Hartford, CT, seven relatives sharing a one-bedroom apartment. His mother worked at a nail salon. When Ocean learned to read at 11, he became the first literate member of his family. Then he became the first to attend college, eventually earning an MFA in writing from NYU. In 2016, he published his debut poetry collection, “Night Sky with Exit Wounds,” which drew immediate attention and acclaim.
In 2019, his first autobiographical novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly
Gorgeous,” written in the form of letters from a Vietnamese American son to his mother, became a bestseller and led to his being awarded a MacArthur Genius grant. By every outward sign, he had seemingly achieved the American Dream as a writer. Then his mother, who’d never been able to read his books, died of cancer. Another celebrated poetry collection, “Time is a Mother,” followed. And now we have Ocean’s magnificent second novel, “The Emperor of Gladness.”Photo credit – Tom Hines
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28 min - Dr. Vivek Murphy, From the Heart
During his tenure as the Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Vivek Murthy became, in effect, our national healer. In a soft but strong voice, he spoke about the country’s maladies like addiction, depression, and violence, and he made the passionate case that loneliness was the contributor to many of those ills, including our over-dependence on social media. That message is at the heart of his book, Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection. In this episode and in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Andrea Elliott, Dr. Murthy talks about the book, about his own bouts of loneliness, and how we can each learn to be a healer in our own lives.
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44 min - Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood—author of more than 60 books in almost every conceivable genre, recipient of more than 100 literary prizes—is a global icon. Like Kafka and Orwell before her, she and her writing have become part of the public discourse, wherever we live and whatever our age. Her intelligence is that vital and exacting, her wit that mischievous, her concerns – feminism, environmentalism, dystopian societies – that urgently relevant. The author is fond of quoting a Polish resistance fighter from the Second World War who once told her: “Pray that you will never have the occasion to be a hero.” As it’s turned out, in her long and singular literary career, Margaret Atwood has indeed had the occasion to be a hero, numerous times, and always risen to the moment. After receiving the 2024 Sun Valley Writers Conference Writer in the World Prize, she spoke to Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Ayad Akhtar about her life, her work, and some of the wonders and terrors of the world we are living in.
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35 min - Niall Ferguson and Evan Osnos on Kissinger
No U.S. secretary of state ever achieved such celebrity while in office as Henry Kissinger; immersed in the philosophy of Kant and the diplomacy of Metternich, he was hailed as one of the most important strategic thinkers America has ever produced. Yet no former secretary of state has been more vehemently criticized, most notably for sins of omission and commission in countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile and East Timor. In this episode – recorded live at the 2024 Writers Conference – renowned historian NIALL FERGUSON, now completing the second of his two-volume biography of Kissinger, talks to New Yorker staff writer and National Book Award-winning author EVAN OSNOS about his subject’s complicated legacy and considers what he might have made of our current foreign policy landscape.
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36 min
About Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference
From the publisher's feed
Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary…
writing's brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page will curate and distill the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley has come to be known for.
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