Claire Messud is the author of six works of fiction. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Her essay collection is called Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write. Her recent novel is called This Strange Eventful History.  She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.

We talked about her family history, Algerian independence, the wisdom of age, emphasizing character, distance from true subjects, colonialism, and her novel’s structure.

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