"I feel like we are all universes unto ourselves." -- Hannah Lillith Assadi
Our fall 2024 season kicked off in late August with an event featuring novelist Hannah Lillith Assadi, a National Book Foundation "5 under 35" honoree. She is the author of Sonora, which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022.
The conversation -- moderated by NYS Writers Institute Assistant Director Mark Koplik -- took place Thursday, August 29, 2024, at the University at Albany.
Assadi's third novel, Paradiso 17, which draws inspiration from the life of her late Palestinian father, Sami Abdul Fattah Assadi, is set to be published by Knopf in 2026.
"I felt compelled... I wanted to tell his story," she said. "It's a really amazing story and it represents a life. A Palestinian life. An American life. He was also a wild man and an aspiring artist. A never fully-realized person."
During the discussion, Assadi addressed the difficulty of writing a novel centered on family, a sensitive topic also mentioned by other visiting writers such as Tara Westover, author of the 2017 memoir Educated.
"I think it is very difficult to write about family knowing that they will read and respond to everything you've written," Assadi said.
(Photo caption: Sami Abdul Fattah Assadi holds his daughter Hannah in this undated photo from her Instagram page)
The event included plenty of questions from the large audience. In response to one question, Assadi discussed her approach to developing characters in her novels.
"My primary interest as a writer is with characters who are in this funny space. You never know if they're mad or they're visionary," Assadi said. "You never quite know. A reader can make their own decision, but me as a writer, I never try to make the decision for the reader. I just present the characters."
Hannah Lillith Assadi teaches at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute. More about this event.
Cosponsored by UAlbany’s Writing & Critical Inquiry Program (WCI) and the English Department’s Creative Writing Program and Young Writers Project.
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