Contributor(s): Lawrence Wright | From the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the storming of the US Capitol to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year tells the story of COVID-19 in authoritative, galvanising detail and with the full drama of events on both a global and intimate scale, illuminating the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the pandemic. A vivid, sweeping, panoramic account of the pandemic’s origins and the missed opportunities and mistakes in the ongoing global fight to contain it.

Meet our speaker and chair

Lawrence Wright (@lawrence_wright) has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. He is also an author, a screenwriter and a playwright. Wright has published twelve books, including The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda's Road to 9/11, which was translated into twenty-four languages and won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. In 2018, the book was adapted into a Hulu original drama.

Peter Trubowitz (@ptrubowitz) is Professor of International Relations and Director of the Phelan US Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Associate Fellow at Chatham House.

More about this event

The LSE's Phelan United States Centre (@LSE_US) is a hub for global expertise, analysis and commentary on America. Our mission is to promote policy-relevant and internationally-oriented scholarship to meet the growing demand for fresh analysis and critical debate on the United States.

You can order the book, The Plague Year: America in the time of COVID-19, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney.

This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series imagining what the world could look like after the crisis, and how we get there.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEUSPandemic