Ayad Akhtar
About
Ayad Akhtar in conversation with Karen Russell Co-Presented with Litquake Tuesday, October 6, 2026 7:30pm Pacific Time KQED Broadcast: 11/22/2026, 11/24/2026, 11/25/2026 Venue: Sydney Goldstein Theater Tickets 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. Akhtar is the author of Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown & Co.), which The Washington Post called “a tour de force” and The New York Times called “a beautiful novel…that had echoes of The Great Gatsby and that circles, with pointed intellect, the possibilities and limitations of American life.” His first novel, American Dervish (Little, Brown & Co.), was published in over 20 languages. As a playwright, he has written McNeal (Lincoln Center, Broadway), Junk (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Kennedy P
