Blackburn Literary Festival Keynote with Rachel Kushner

A collaboration of Duke Arts and the Department of English, the Blackburn Literary Festival’s keynote and panel bring four celebrated novelists together for a night of reading and conversation. This year’s theme, “History and Its Alternatives,” explores the storyteller’s place in a world in which the truth seems ever more contentious and ever more elusive. Following her keynote address, Rachel Kushner (Creation Lake) will be joined onstage by fellow novelists Claire Messud (This Strange, Eventful History) and Paul Yoon (The Hive and the Honey). Akhil Sharma, Duke English professor and PEN/Hemingway award-winning author of An Obedient Father, will lead this year’s guest in a discussion of their craft.

Rachel Kushner is the author of the internationally acclaimed novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex From Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 was published in April 2021. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been translated into twenty-six languages.