Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Paul Harding
Join the NYS Writers Institute on Thursday, January 25, for a pair of conversations with Paul Harding, the first events of our 41st season.
Thursday, January 25
4:30 p.m. Craft Talk, Campus Center West Boardroom.
7:30 p.m. Reading/Conversation, Recital Hall, UAlbany Performing Arts Center.
Both at the University at Albany
Free and open to the public.
Books will be for sale and a signing will follow each event.
Winner of the Pulitzer for Tinkers, Paul Harding’s new novel is This Other Eden (2023), based on the true story of a multiracial community that took refuge from intolerance on an island off the coast of Maine from 1792 to 1912.
The novel presents the lives and experiences of a formerly enslaved Black man and his Irish wife, and multiple generations of their descendants and fellow islanders. Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, This Other Eden was also a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction, and an NPR 2023 “Books We Love” Pick.
Read more at https://www.nyswritersinstitute.org/paulharding
Praise for This Other Eden
“This Other Eden is ultimately a testament of love: love of kin, love of nature, love of art, love of self, love of home. Harding has written a novel out of poetry and sunlight, violent history and tender remembering. The humans he has created are, thankfully, not flattened into props and gimmicks, which sometimes happens when writers work across time and difference; instead they pulse with aliveness, dreamlike but tangible, so real it could make you weep.”
― Danez Smith, New York Times
“[This Other Eden] is a harrowing tale of paradise lost and a lyrical examination of people in isolation just trying to get by…[It] is a novel that is both devastating and meditative, a combination that is characteristic of Harding’s work.”
― MJ Franklin, New York Times
“[Harding] writes with the gravitas of a mythmaker…The pace of Harding’s storytelling is stately, his descriptions, even of small events, gorgeous…This Other Eden is beautiful and agonizing―rather like the real place that inspired it.”
― Claire Messud, Harpers
