Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference Sun Valley Writers’ Conference

In this episode, recorded live at the 2023 Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, New Yorker Staff Writer Patrick Radden Keefe, who has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award to the Orwell Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award for his meticulously reported, hypnotically engaging work on the many ways people behave badly, tells a few stories and lifts the hood on what he calls his “abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial.”

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In bestselling author Curtis Sittenfeld’s much-loved new novel, she explores—with her typically keen observations and trademark ability to bring complex women to life on the page—the neurosis-inducing and heart-fluttering wonder of love,while slyly dissecting the social rituals of romance and gender relations in the modern age. Sittenfeld sits down with SVWC Literary Director John Burnham Schwartz—a former professor of hers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—to discuss what makes Romantic Comedy a romantic comedy, her approach to genre and craft in previous novels such as American Wife, Rodham, and Eligible, and other stories from her literary journey.
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In this episode of Beyond the Page, recorded live at the 2023 conference, poet and memoirist Javier Zamora talks to legendary bookseller Mitchell Kaplan about his memoir Solito, which chronicles his experiences traveling from El Salvador to the United States, by himself, when he was 9 years old.
Javier Zamora writes, and speaks, like someone who believes he can never afford to forget that journey, or the experience on the other side, in America, of growing up undocumented. You won’t be able to forget, either. And that is the power of great literature.
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Recorded at the closing of the 2023 Sun Valley Writers' Conference, Pulitzer Prize-winning humor writer (and one of the funniest people alive) Dave Barry talks about his latest novel Swamp Story, using it mainly as a springboard to talk about his crazy home state of Florida, and from there, about some of the problems facing our nation in general, and what he would do to fix them if by chance he ever gets the authority to do so – which, Dave says, we should all pray he never does. And finally, Dave assures us that the one promise he can make is that nobody will come away from this talk with any useful information whatsoever.
Here’s Dave Barry, closing the 2023 Sun Valley Writers’ Conference.
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Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Andrea Elliot sits down with another Pulitzer winner, novelist and playwright Ayad Akhtar, at the 2023 Writers’ Conference to talk about Elliot’s book, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City. The subject of the book is a Black girl in New York City named Dasani, whose story – told through the lens of almost a decade of Elliot’s deep reporting – brings to vivid and devastating life the realities of how poverty and race and the moral failings of our institutions impact the most marginal among us.  Elliott tells us about Dasani's life and how it is both singular and emblematic, and she talks about her own passions for the deeply immersive journalism that is the hallmark of her professional life.
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On this episode, author and physician Abraham Verghese – who received the 2023 Sun Valley Writers’ Conference WRITER IN THE WORLD prize – brings us intimately and poetically into the heart of his remarkable, inspiring journey from his childhood in Ethiopia to his experiences as a young doctor in America during the AIDS epidemic, to his beginnings as a writer. Verghese would go on to become a professor of medicine at Stanford, as well as the author of the classic memoir My Own Country and the beloved, bestselling novels Cutting for Stone and The Covenant of Water. Here, he describes the meaning and arc of his personal journey with heartfelt tenderness and appreciation, offering new insights into his vision and practice of his joint vocations, and of the profound link between healing and storytelling.
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