As part of the 2026 Iowa City Book Festival, the UNESCO City of Literature invites you to enjoy a lively conversation between two literary powerhouses.
Marilynne Robinson is the author of the novels Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, Lila, and Jack. Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, while Home received the Orange Prize for Fiction and Lila won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Robinson is also the author of numerous books of essays, including Reading Genesis, The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, and Mother Country, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her honors include the National Humanities Medal, the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
A longtime member of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop faculty, Robinson taught at the University of Iowa for 25 years before retiring as the F. Wendell Miller Professor in 2016. She remains one of America’s most acclaimed novelists and essayists.
Nicholas Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and columnist for The New York Times, where his twice-weekly opinion columns have appeared since 2001. He joined the newspaper in 1984 and has served as a correspondent in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo, as well as Associate Managing Editor of the Sunday editions.
Kristof won his first Pulitzer Prize with his wife, journalist Sheryl WuDunn, for their coverage of China’s Tiananmen Square democracy movement. He received a second Pulitzer Prize for commentary that brought international attention to the genocide in Darfur and other humanitarian crises.
Over the course of his career, Kristof has reported from more than 140 countries. He is the co-author, with WuDunn, of China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power and Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia.
This event is free and open to the public.