Ten Evenings: Ayad Akhtar, Author of Homeland Elegies

Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures Presents: Ayad Akhtar

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced, comes Homeland Elegies blending fact and fiction to tell the story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made—of an immigrant father, an American son, and the country they both call home.

A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies is part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel.
Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation’s unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one—least of all himself—in the process.

Ayad Akhtar is a playwright, novelist, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award for Literature. He is the author of American Dervish, published in more than twenty languages and named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012. As a playwright, he has written Junk, Disgraced, The Who & The What, and The Invisible Hand. He is the board president of PEN/America.