Ayad Akhtar’s previous book, Homeland Elegies, was one of Barack Obama’s favourite books of the year, and included in best of lists from The New York Times, Washington Post, and Publishers Weekly. This daring new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer continues his gripping fictional journey through a nation on the edge. Moving between rural America and Europe, Islam and Christianity, the intimate and the metaphysical, The Radiance is a tale of this fraught moment in American history; and, more broadly, a visionary novel of spiritual transformation in an age of fracture. Akhtar speaks about this electrifying new work with Minelle Mahtani.
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AYAD AKHTAR is a novelist and playwright. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors. Akhtar is the author of the novels American Dervish, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, and Homeland Elegies, named one of 10 Best Books of 2020 by The New York Times. He has also authored the plays McNeal, Junk, Disgraced, The Who & The What, and The Invisible Hand. Akhtar was named the New York State Author in 2021.
MINELLE MAHTANI is an author, former radio host and professor. She is the author of the award-winning memoir, May it Have a Happy Ending (with Penguin Random House). She is the Chair of Canadian Studies at UBC and has won two national magazine awards for her creative non fiction work. She is from Toronto and is of mixed Indian-Iranian descent.
