Ayad Akhtar is the kind of writer who refuses to play it safe. The Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and novelist has spent his career tackling some of the thorniest questions about faith and what it means to belong in America. His debut novel, American Dervish, followed a Muslim boy growing up in Wisconsin and wrestling with faith and first love. Then came Disgraced, his blistering play about a successful Pakistani American lawyer whose carefully constructed life begins to unravel over the course of one explosive dinner party. Since then, Akhtar has taken on everything from religion and family (The Who & The What) to Wall Street excess (Junk) to geopolitics and capitalism (The Invisible Hand). In other words: If there’s a complicated subject most people would rather avoid at dinner, Akhtar has probably written something brilliant about it.
And he’s got the accolades to prove it. In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Disgraced, Akhtar has received two Tony Award nominations, and his genre-bending 2020 novel, Homeland Elegies—which blurred the boundaries between fiction and cultural criticism—was named one of the 10 best books of the year by the New York Times. Now, six years later, Akhtar is returning with a novel that once again makes the line between author and character tantalizingly difficult to find.
His latest, The Radiance, out Sept. 29, begins with a startling premise: A successful novelist named Ayad Akhtar (yes, you read that right) is struck and severely injured in a hit-and-run on a country road in upstate New York. But the accident in this autofictional novel is only the beginning. “He experiences a kind of upending of his world,” says Akhtar, “as his experience veers into a very weird and uncanny, and medically questionable, as well as morally heightened, emotionally sensitive register, and he experiences a very fraught world around him.”
For this episode of the Reader’s Digest Escalator Interview, Leigh Belz Ray caught up with Akhtar to talk about The Radiance, his life as both a novelist and playwright, the books and writers that have shaped him and plenty more.
Watch the exclusive interview with Ayad Akhtar below, and then scroll down to discover his books, acclaimed plays and reading recommendations!
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