Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, novelist, and former president of PEN America, returns to Chicago Humanities. He’ll tell us about his newest work of fiction, The Radiance, named one of TIME’s most anticipated books of 2026. This novel is a fictional take on the cultural warfare currently playing out on college campuses across the country. And it moves between subjects that sometimes feel at odds: rural America and Europe, Islam and Christianity, the intimate and the metaphysical. Akhtar joins us to ask not only what has broken in America, but what radiance remains.

Akhtar is joined in conversation by Agnes Callard, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.

This program is presented in partnership with the Northwestern University Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.

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