CBH Talk | Page by Page: Jennifer Egan and Hernan Diaz in Conversation

Two of today’s most acclaimed novelists, Pulitzer Prize winners Jennifer Egan and Hernan Diaz, come together for a rare, in-depth conversation about the foundations of their craft, their work in archives, and how the historical record can both anchor and ignite narrative invention.

In this intimate one-on-one dialogue, Diaz and Egan will reflect on their celebrated novels, including Trust and Manhattan Beach, and discuss how richly imagined past worlds emerge through meticulous research, archival discovery, and inventive narrative structure.

They’ll explore the creative process from the granular—where they write, when they write—to the abstract—when is a work finished, and how has their relationship to writing evolved over the years? They’ll also turn to Brooklyn, their shared home base, and consider how the borough’s vibrant literary ecosystem has supported and inspired their work.

This is a rare opportunity to hear two master storytellers speak candidly about the art, discipline, and mystery of writing.

Egan photo by Pieter M. Van Hattem. Diaz photo by Pascal Perich.

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Participants

Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times best-selling author of Trust, one of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the Century. His previous novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Kirkus Award, a Whiting Award, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. Ply, his latest novel, will be published by Riverhead in the fall of 2026. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages.

Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read. Her previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was recently named one of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Her new novel, The Candy House, a companion to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was named one of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2022 and one of President Obama’s favorite reads of the year. She has served as President of PEN America and twice as Artist-in-Residence in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught courses in 19th and 20th Century literature. Her year-long reporting on street homelessness and supportive housing in New York City was published in The New Yorker in September of 2023.