This autumn, the British Library presents American Writers’ Week, a unique five‑day series of conversations with some of the most essential voices in contemporary American literature.
Running from 28 September to 2 October 2026, the Week marks the 250th anniversary of the establishment of the United States and brings together critically acclaimed authors including Joyce Carol Oates, Alison Bechdel, Armistead Maupin, Rabih Alameddine, Jeanine Cummins, Daniel Kraus, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Katie Kitamura.
American Writers’ Week is presented in association with Festival America, who will be bringing a selection of authors to the London event series. Founded in Vincennes in 2002, Festival America is a bi-annual celebration hosted in Paris showcasing the richness and diversity of writing from the United States, Canada and the Caribbean, and has become a major European meeting point for authors, translators, publishers and readers.
The programme spotlights writers whose work reflects on the creative lives, histories and identities shaped by the United States, whether it is the country of their birth, adoption, or one they chose to leave, offering audiences a rare opportunity to explore the past, present and future of American storytelling.
Across the week, audiences will hear from Joyce Carol Oates, the five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee author of Blonde, Them and The Fox and The Frenzy who will reflect on violence, imagination, patriarchy and other themes explored in her recent works. Writer and graphic novelist Alison Bechdel, creator of the acclaimed graphic memoir Fun Home and the long‑running strip Dykes to Watch Out For, will discuss her creative life and cultural impact. Armistead Maupin, author of the iconic Tales of the City series and the memoir Logical Family, will speak about his groundbreaking chronicles of queer life. Rabih Alameddine, winner of the National Book Award for The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) and author of The Wrong End of the Telescope, will explore storytelling, memory, queer identity and Lebanon’s modern history. Jeanine Cummins, bestselling author of American Dirt and the new novel Speak to Me of Home, will discuss migration, belonging and family. Daniel Kraus, author of Angel Down, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, of Whalefall, appearing soon as a major film, and co-author with Guillermo del Toro on The Shape of Water, will examine his genre‑blending work in horror and fantasy. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize‑winning author of The Sympathizer and The Committed, will reflect on otherness, solidarity and the responsibilities of fiction in his new essay collection To Save and to Destroy. Booker Prize‑shortlisted author of Audition and Intimacies Katie Kitamura will discuss identity, performance and psychological depth across her work.
Tickets for the events are available here, either to attend in person or to watch online either live or for two weeks after on catch up. Pay What You Can pricing for online events and over 50% discount for young people (16-25).
Buy tickets for two or more American Writers’ Week events and save 25%.
Full programme
American Writers’ Week: Joyce Carol Oates
Monday 28 September, 18:15 – 19:30
British Library Pigott Theatre and online.
Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 60 novels and many volumes of short stories, criticism and memoir, earning her five Pulitzer Prize nominations and a National Book award, among others. Her best-known works in a remarkably consistent career include Blonde, a haunting, fictionalised account of the life of Marilyn Monroe, Them, part of the Wonderland quartet, and Zombie, loosely based on the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. She reflects on violence and death, the real and the imagined, patriarchy and human failings, including in her recent The Fox a novel of literary and psychological suspense about the dark secrets that surface after the shocking disappearance of a charismatic, mercurial teacher. At the same time, she is rarely judgmental, and her new collection of short stories The Frenzy, is sympathetic to the impact of loss and the power of friendship. At the age of 88 Joyce Carol Oates is also an active and powerful voice on social media.
American Writers’ Week: Alison Bechdel
Monday 28 September, 20:00 – 21:15
British Library Pigott Theatre and online.
Alison Bechdel emerged in the 1980s with Dykes to Watch Out For, a groundbreaking weekly strip that featured a group of mostly lesbian friends and has gone on to publish a series of acclaimed graphic novels and memoirs. Fun Home explored her closeted, funeral-director father’s suicide and her coming out: it subsequently became an award-winning musical, recently revived in Manchester. It was followed by Are You My Mother?, on psychoanalysis and her relationship with her mother, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, about her compulsive exercising, and most recently Spent, featuring a semi fictionalised Alison Bechdel who writes and draws in rural Vermont, reflects on her career, campaigns for progressive causes and hangs out with her wife, friends and characters from her earlier work.
Alison joins writer Catherine Riley in conversation for a revealing look across her creative career.
American Writers’ Week: Armistead Maupin
Tuesday 29 September, 18:15 – 19:30
British Library Pigott Theatre and online.
Armistead Maupin is the author of the Tales of the City novels, about a ‘diverse, interconnected community of San Francisco bohemians which shaped our collective fantasy of what LGBT life is and could be. Most recently he published a long-awaited memoir; chronicling his odyssey from the old South to freewheeling California; from a homoerotic Navy initiation ceremony in the jungles of Vietnam to San Francisco in the early 1970s and from a curious youth to being a ground-breaking writer.
American Writers’ Week: Rabih Alameddine
Tuesday 29 September, 20:00 – 21:15
British Library Pigott Theatre and online.
Rabih Alameddine won the 2025 US National Book Award for fiction for his buoyant and camp seventh novel The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother). Told by A 63-year-old gay philosophy teacher and drag entertainer living in Beirut, it is set against the backdrop of the modern history of Lebanon from the civil war to the port explosion in 2020. It is a queer coming-of-age tale, an exploration of the bond between a mother and a son, and a meditation on storytelling, memory, survival and what it means to be truly free.
American Writers’ Week: Jeanine Cummins
Wednesday 30 September, 18:15 – 19:30
British Library Pigott Theatre and online.
Jeanine Cummins most recent novel Speak to Me of Home, follows three generations of women from Puerto Rico to the American Midwest and back again. Partly based on her own Puerto Rican – Irish family story, it is a poignant and uplifting tale of twists of fate and resilience which asks: what does it mean to call a place home?
It follows her worldwide bestselling American Dirt, a gripping fiction about traumatic flight of Mexican migrants, which created a major debate about the right to write stories from beyond one’s personal experience.
American Writers’ Week: Daniel Kraus
Wednesday 30 September, 20:00 – 21:15
British Library Pigott Theatre and online.
A rare chance to hear from one of the most adventurous writers of our time, recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Angel Down. This astonishing cinematic horror novel about survival, supernatural wonder, and moral conflict, set amongst the grit and mud of the trenches in WW1, was described by The Pulitzer committee as “a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism, and science fiction into a cohesive whole, told in a single sentence.” It followed Whalefall, appearing soon as a major film starring Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin and Elisabeth Shue.
Daniel Kraus is also the multi award winning co-author of The Shape of Water and Trollhunters alongside Guillermo del Toro and of The Living Dead and Pay the Piper with legendary filmmaker George A. Romero.
In conversation with horror anthologist Johnny Mains.
American Writers’ Week: Viet Thanh Nguyen
Thursday 1 October, 18:15 – 19:30
British Library Pigott Theatre and online.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is considered one of the leading voices in the urgent conversation around the immigrant experience. His breakout debut novel The Sympathizer was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and was turned into an HBO series. A prolific essayist and opinion writer, he has published in The New York Times, Time, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian.
In conversation with author and screenwriter Nikesh Shukla he talks about the themes of his most recent book, To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, a deeply personal and provocative collection of essays that explores what it means to be an outsider from a variety of perspectives.
Nguyen reflects on his lived experience as a child refugee from Vietnam as well as the literary, historical, and political dimensions of otherness. In bold meditation on the power — and burden — of giving voice to the voiceless, he interrogates the role of the writer in times of violence, the responsibilities of fiction, and the possibility of solidarity across borders and communities.
American Writers’ Week: Katie Kitamura
Friday 2 October. 18:15 – 19:30
British Library Pigott Theatre and online.
Katie Kitamura is a master of, mystery, psychological depth and intimate relationship dynamics in her taut, intriguing writing. Audition was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, short listed for the 2025 Booker Prize and selected by Barack Obama as one of his favourite books of the year. A hypnotic and exhilarating journey of intrigue, it follows an actress – successful, married and settled in her life, whose world is upended when a young man approaches her and tells that he believes he is her son. From that point, two narratives unfurl – two versions of events, and two distinct realities. She interrogates the roles we play – as parent, partner, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately. Katie Kitamura’s previous novels include the multi-award nominated Intimacies and A Separation.
