Lawrence Wright looks for America through the lens of Covid-19

The author Lawrence Wright has excelled as an investigative reporter, novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. New Yorker editor David Remnick says he has written “some of the most astonishing journalism of our time.” He is known for his meticulous research, journalistic and otherwise.

Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and The Road to 9-11. Last April, he released the pandemic-themed thriller The End of October. The timing was perfect, if accidental. More recently, his New Yorker article The Plague Year processed our experience of the Covid-19 pandemic so far with great detail and insight.

Seattle Arts & Lectures presented this conversation with Lawrence Wright on February 9, 2021. It’s part of their journalism series, created in partnership with Seattle-based journalists Timothy Egan and Sam Howe Verhovek. Verhovek interviewed Wright.

Kai Ryan of Blue Heron Middle School read his poem Dreams to open the program.

Please note: This recording contains one unedited word of an adult nature.