Ayad Akhtar will be in conversation with actress, director, and Oberlin College theater professor and Pittsburgh Public Theater artistic director Marya Sea Kaminski as part of Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures on October 9th, 2026 at 7P.M. in the South Wing Reading Room of the Main Branch of the Carnegie Library.
I first read the work of the Pulitzer Prize winning author, playwright, and actor Ayad Akhtar the first year after the pandemic when my family and I were living in a red-brick, faux-colonial townhome in McLean, Virginia that we were renting from a fellow at the Brookings Institute (living the Millennial American dream of renting from successful Generation Xers). McLean, if you’re not familiar with it, is an abundantly unnerving inner Beltway subway of strip-malls and McMansions where the most powerful employers are Mars Incorporated (as in the chocolate company) and the Central Intelligence Agency. Whenever something was about to happen internationally, our neighbors with seemingly anodyne jobs all got suspiciously jumpy. My wife was working endless shifts in either the emergency room or specialized COVID wards and we were new parents, wherein I first had to figure out how to change a diaper by accessing a YouTube tutorial. All of which is to say that this was an abundantly strange time to be living through everything from COVID to January 6th while assiduously watched over by an authoritarian HOA composed of U.S. government spooks. Despite never having particular had much affection for the usual suspects of autofiction (I won’t name names), Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies wasn’t necessarily the normal book that I would have chosen for my continual sleepless nights of early fatherhood. Yet there was something about that novel, it’s evocative cover design with its stark, strangely sized lettering over a abstracted, golden, jagged tree, or especially its title that ventured so much, which made me fork over cash (or credit) to Jeff Bezos. I’ve been an apt reader of Akhtar ever since (the landlord, meanwhile, stiffed us on the deposit when we moved out).
“Because being American is not what they tell you – freedom and opportunity and all that horseshit,” says the narrator of Homeland Elegies, who is also named “Ayad Akhtar.” The protagonist says “There is culture here, for sure, and it has nothing to do with all that well-meaning nonsense. It’s about racism and money worship – and when you’re on the correct side of both those things? That’s when you really belong.” Homeland Elegies was the first work of autofiction – that shaggy beast where slippage between the fictional and the factual, the fantastical and the autobiographical, gestures towards a greater truth – that felt as if it truly encompassed the strange reality of being an American at this particular point in time. Like his author, this “Ayad Akhtar” is a successful Pakistani-American playwright, and like the author, the narrator’s father was a cardiologist who (maybe like the author’s father?) happened to treat Donald Trump. Throughout Homeland Elegies, Akhtar explores identity and immigration, faith and doubt, finance and corruption, through the twisted prism of reality. Inevitability readers try to guess what’s “real” in Homeland Elegies, but that’s to fundamentally miss the point of this variety of autofiction. In our current moment of fake news and deep fakes, of AI and LLMs, to write a fiction can feel adorably antiquated when our own lives, experiences, and observations feel so filtered through a dreamlike unreality. Which is not to say that there is anything anti-humanistic about Akhtar’s novel – far from it. For it’s a novel that takes seriously what it means to be a finite human trapped in systems of family and religion, government and culture, which are not of our own making. Now Akhtar has returned with a sequel of sorts to Homeland Elegies, a novel entitled The Radiance where the same narrator experiences a religious epiphany after a potentially racially motivated attack, all of which is framed by his experience as an adjunct creative writing instructor at an upstate New York liberal arts college during the high-water period of what’s increasingly called “Woke 1.0.” In August, I had the opportunity to interview Akhtar for The Pittsburgh Review of Books by email, where we talked about drama, religion, fiction, and the perils and promise of free speech today.
Ed Simon: In interviews you’ve described how adopting an imagined persona from your own name, as you do in Homeland Elegies and The Radiance, affords you a particular means of interacting with readers in a spirit of immediacy, though you also emphasize that you’re a fiction writer and not a memoirist. As an author of autofiction, I wonder how much of our current means of discourse, though social media and so on, impacts how you approach the genre?
Ayad Akhtar: Thanks for this very astute question. Structurally, I thought of Homeland Elegies as an Instagram novel as I was writing it, where the larger action of curating an image of the self could unify disparate elements, disparate discourses: essay, history, scene work, monologue, in much the same way that landscapes and recipes and philosophical quotes and workout photos can co-exist on the platform. In writing The Radiance, I realized that the narrative attention of the reader (by whom I also mean myself) had narrowed further. There was more and more of a premium on an absorption in the present, where context and even commentary was secondary to some more primary expectation. TikTok became a way to be thinking about this kind of absorption, in resonances and valences, and to a more immediate sense of narrative expectation. Presentism that allows for the narration of history. That takes the experience of narrating history as an involvement of the present.
ES: Inevitably I imagine that you receive lots of questions as to what is “true” or not in your novels – I’m sure people always ask if your father actually knew Donald Trump or not, for example. In a more general sense, since every memoir involves a degree of artifice and every fictional work is in part grounded in autobiography, what do you think is the relationship, if we can call it that, between fiction and nonfiction – not necessarily just in literature, but also in a broader sense?
AA: Literature’s standard is not journalistic. Triple-sourced verification of one’s assertions is not an imprimatur of the kind of truth that literature is after, which is fundamentally metaphorical. A higher truth. The truth distilled into pattern, to invoke Vivian Gornick’s wonderful formulation about the wisdom of literature. There is, as well, an increasingly fickle epistemology at work in the public sphere, something we could call the entertainment model of consciousness, in which distraction value is more central to the experience than truth value. In this atmosphere, any recognizable distinction between fiction and non-fiction becomes more complicated. Indeed, we see that so many readers look to the identity of an author to validate fictional exercises in imagination in novels, as if looking in fiction for the non-fictional bona fides to corroborate the validity of the depiction. This is just one of many ways in which reading is changing. I believe I have to change, too, to meet this reader.
ES: The Radiance, as a kind of sequel to Homeland Elegies, is very much a campus novel, though interestingly a kind of ambivalent one, since the protagonist is clearly a writer before they’re necessarily an academic. When writing The Radiance, how did you position it in that genre of the campus novel? Did you see it as taking part in that tradition and were you influenced by any specific examples?
AA: The primary subject of The Radiance is consciousness, or what we might have called the soul at another time. By definition, the field of this inquiry opens onto some very large and unanswerable questions. That these questions would unfold against the backdrop of a campus, the place of higher education, where such questions rightly belong, even if they have receded from its foreground today, is by design. The book is an exploration, in part, of what it means to be involved in a higher education. It may sound strange to be thinking of Plato’s dialogues as original forms of campus drama, but they are that, and very much a part of this book. I thought a great deal about Roth’s The Human Stain, and particularly, about the campus as a place where the private and public collide in ways that come to define a political moment, as they did for Roth in 1998.
ES: This is clearly a political novel, as all your work is. Something that interested me in The Radiance were the kind of generational differences between Ayad (or “Ayad”) and his students, the way that there can be pitfalls, miscommunications, even profound cultural missteps. Does The Radiance itself enter those kinds of conversations about what’s “woke,” or “cancel culture,” and so on, in an unambiguous way? Where do you think the faultlines lay?
AA: To attempt writing a book about the eternal present without situating in the actual social present felt impossible to me. The larger question of what it means to be is always a question of what it means to be now, too. Ideas about this, mores, change, but the fundamental urges and fears underneath those changes are unchanging: freedom, desire, legibility, transcendence, death. The book certainly stages a series of conflicts around different relationships to those things, often (though not only) generationally inflected. But where “I” might sit in those conflicts is an open question, even for me!
ES: Something that drew me to Homeland Elegies, before I even knew the plot, was the title. I was fascinated to learn how you were inspired by Giacomi Leopardi’s poem “To Italy,” and your desire to somehow encompass our own nation, with all its convulsions and contradictions right now, in a novel. How much is “America” your major subject? If the country is really breaking apart at the seams, what role does literature have in making sense of that collapse in real time? Can literature do anything about it?
AA: Language shapes consciousness. Finding the language for our collective experience is a great challenge, but a worthy one. Clearly, there are works of literature that have shaped how people live and politics writ large: Werther, Zhivago, Republic, The Jungle, etc. But that is a very high calling, and not just of a writer, but of the reader capable of imagining the value of metaphor as a way of thinking about reality. It requires an engagement different from what this moment seems to be asking of us—which is closer, as I said earlier, to an entertainment model of engagement.
ES: A major theme in your work is hybrid-identity, particular in the immigrant experience. Is there a particular aspect about American multicultural experience, or maybe Pakistani-American or Muslim experience in the United States, that you haven’t explored yet but that you hope to in your future work?
AA: The Radiance is more thoroughly, and more quietly, a book about the Prophet. About the prophetic model of revelation, an enaction in the present day of a larger Hebraic myth about knowledge. So this is, of course, the kind of thing that gets to the root of what you’re asking me, but in a very subtle way. What does culture and mythos mean to the experience of meaning and awareness itself? I’ve started to think of Elegies and this book as part of a trilogy, and there seems to be something bubbling up to complete it, a book that more properly limns the shape of power in the world as we are coming to experience it in the 21st century.
ES: In terms of the fluidity of identity, you’re very much an author with a mastery of several different mediums. A Pulitzer Prize winner, a Tony Award nominee, a playwright, a novelist, an actor on stage, television, and in film. There is, to the best of my knowledge, no American writer who is also as accomplished as an actor (and vice versa!). I’m curious how these different aspects of creative expression interact with each other; how does performing inform writing, how do the differences and similarities between prose and drama affect one another, and so on?
AA: You are too kind. Sam Shepard certainly did it; Tracy Letts; Anna Deavere Smith. There are others. I am shaped by embodiment. By the demand for it, as an actor, and the yearning to provide a narrative experience in which dramatic embodiment is the ideal. I’m a dramatic storyteller no matter what the form, which means I’m interested in particular kinds of movements, reversals, recognitions, and I rely on voice to convey a sense of something deeply lived. Acting, in many ways—the demands and rewards of it, the immediacy of it for audiences when done well—is the template for my creative process.
ES: Among contemporary American writers you’re perhaps the most notable in investigating the complexities of religion and faith, in part as an attendant issue of cultural identity, but then in the wholly more mysterious and difficult realm of belief (and doubt) as well. Something that I found fascinating about The Radiance, implicit in its very title, was how much of it read as if it was a kind of spiritual autobiography, as an account of mysticism (or a type of mysticism) after the protagonist has this ambiguous rebirth following his accident. Is there a lineage of spiritual autobiography, certain examples of books or authors, that’s impactful on you in terms of the vision you express in the novel? What is the role of religious ecstasy in all of this (I can’t help but think of the title for American Dervish here)?
AS: Montaigne was thrown from a horse into a beatitude that lasted a few days and changed his life. Strangely, Rousseau had a different version of a similar experience when he was run down by a Great Dane. In both cases, large animals caused a rupture and an awakening. In The Radiance, the narrator is hit by a “Ram” truck—my own version of a life-disrupting large animal—and ends up in an evolving state of grace, if you will, that lasts eight months. The book charts the unusual experience in great detail, and also tracks its gradual dissolution. I thought a great deal about a few books as I wrote this one: William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. Hildegard of Bingen’s account of her visions, Scivias. Ibn Arabi, Dante, Blake, and of course, Plato. Each of these writers is writing from their own experience, however we want to define it. Because thinking, too, is experience. And yes, the ecstatic register is certainly the warp to the book’s darker, more elusive woof. I do think that the compass of religious experience in general contains a larger set of experiences than we normally think of.
ES: There’s a sense, I think among all of us, that we’re at a particular cultural inflection point, not just between left and right but in an internecine sense as well, and where exactly things are headed is very much uncertain. I know that there have been debates and controversies within PEN America, an organization that you’re the former president of and are currently a board trustee for. In the context of all of that, how do you characterize free expression in 2026 and the nature of literature right now? Do you have any predictions on what the future might hold in those regards?
AA: My term on the board ended in 2025, so I’m speaking only as a former president rather than as a current trustee. The larger question of free expression is, for me, more simply a question of freedom of thought and the imagination. The increasing presence of the digital devices in our lives, and the ways we have increasingly allowed machines to do our thinking, this era of digital cognition which has been in ascendance for a decade and a half, has made it increasingly difficult to understand the real issues and the real stakes. Preserving the space for thinking, for freedom in thinking, is also about understanding the necessity of mental hygiene in an era when we are being thought as much as thinking. The core values of literary life are in retreat: sustained concentration; the ability to sit with ambiguity and contradiction; patience with the hidden pleasures of the deeper poetic values of language. Making sure individually, as writers, as thinkers, as readers, that we keep these values alive in our lives as they retreat from the culture at large, this is a meaningful way to be thinking about what is at stake.
