Susan Choi, Douglas Stuart, Geoff Dyer
Lauded novelist Susan Choi’s new Flashlight (2025) explores a girl’s confrontation with loss and memory after her father’s sudden disappearance revealing how childhood trauma can splinter a family. Booker Prize winner Douglas Stuart portrays adolescence in working-class Glasgow in his acclaimed novels Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo, while critic and writer Geoff Dyer adds a non-fiction perspective with Homework, reflecting on his own coming-of-age in 1960s–70s England during a time of post-war upheaval and rapid social change. Together, these three writers will discuss the fragile yet resilient nature of people navigating fractured worlds. From intimate family struggles in suburban America and inner-city Glasgow to the societal upheavals of post-war England, each author’s work illuminates how memory and adversity shape their protagonists’ identities. This panel will bridge continents and decades as Choi, Stuart, and Dyer explore how memory, family, and social environments indelibly shape a person, and how even in the most fractured of worlds, people find the resilience to survive and forge their own identity.
Date
Jun 21, 11:00am to 12:00pm
Featuring
Susan Choi
Susan Choi is the author of Trust Exercise, which received the National Book Award for fiction, as well as the novels The Foreign Student, American Woman, A Person of Interest, and My Education. She is a recipient of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award, a Lambda Literary award, the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her new novel, published in June, is Flashlight.
Douglas Stuart
Douglas Stuart is a New York Times bestselling author whose work has been translated in to more 40 languages. His debut novel, Shuggie Bain, won the 2020 Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. It was named both the Overall Book of the Year, and Debut of the Year at the British Book Awards, as well as being a finalist for over 20 other literary awards. His latest novel, Young Mungo, was a Sunday Times #1 bestseller and a finalist for the Carnegie Medal. He is adapting both of his novels for A24 pictures. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Stuart has an Masters from the Royal College of Art and since 2000, he has lived and worked in New York City. His essays on gender, class, and conformity have feature on Lit Hub and his short stories are published in The New Yorker. He is currently at work on his third novel.
Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer is the award-winning author of The Last Days of Roger Federer—a “masterful, beautiful, reluctantly moving book” (LA Times) that weaves his own reflections on late middle age with the final works of artists, writers, and athletes. His genre-defying body of work includes See/Saw, a decade-spanning tour de force of photography criticism; But Beautiful, a book about jazz and jazz musicians–winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; Broadsword Calling Danny Boy, hailed by Michael Ondaatje as his “funniest book yet”; White Sands, a wry and meditative exploration of travel and self-discovery; the novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; and Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, an essay collection.
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