The Fictional Self in Exile: Hannah Lillith Assadi & Naeem Murr, Sponsored by the Center for Fiction
Friday, March 19, 2027, 9:00 a.m. to 10:15 a.m. CT
In their novels Paradiso 17 and Every Exit Brings You Home, Hannah Lillith Assadi and Naeem Murr’s characters’ families are exiled from their homes in Palestine during the 1948 Nakba. This displacement affects their futures in ways that are impossible to predict and utterly captivating to read, bringing the borders of nations and the interior lines of gender, sexuality, loyalty, and familial love into question in surprising ways. They will discuss crafting complex stories and characters.
Hannah Lillith Assadi is the author of Paradiso 17, inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father. Her debut novel, Sonora, received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. The Stars Are Not Yet Bells was named a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022. She is the coeditor of a forthcoming anthology of the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish.
Photo Credit: Jordan Ledy
Naeem Murr is the author of four novels: The Boy, a New York Times Notable Book; The Genius of the Sea; The Perfect Man, which was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Best Book of Europe and South Asia and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; and Every Exit Brings You Home, which was just published by W. W. Norton. A former Stegner fellow at Stanford, among his awards are a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, a PEN/Beyond Margins Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Chicago and teaches at Northwestern University.