In conversation with John Freeman

Anthony Doerr won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for All the Light We Cannot See, “a beautiful, daring, heartbreaking, oddly joyous novel” (Seattle Times) about a blind French girl and a German boy navigating the carnage of World War II. Also the winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and a National Book Award finalist, it spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list. Doerr’s other work includes the novel About Grace, two story collections, and a memoir, for which he has earned five O. Henry Prizes, the Story Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. A novel of the interconnected tapestry of human experience, Cloud Cuckoo Land weaves together the lives of a fifteenth century orphan, an octogenarian in present-day Idaho, and a girl on an interstellar spacecraft decades from today.

John Freeman was the editor of Granta until 2013. His books include Dictionary of the Undoing, How to Read a Novelist, Tales of Two Americas, and Tales of Two Planets. His poetry includes the collections Maps, The Park, and the forthcoming Wind, Trees. In 2021, he edited the anthologies There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love with Tracy K. Smith, and The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story. An Executive Editor at Knopf, he teaches writing and literature classes at NYU.