Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 04 November
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
It’s hard to imagine a more fruitful blind date than the 1992 dinner in New York City that brought together Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman. Within three weeks, the pair were engaged and the next year they were married.
They’ve since had four children and between them, released more than twenty books. In 2000, Michael Chabon won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his third novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The book, which celebrates the golden era of adventure comic books, was loved by critics and the general reading public alike. Described in the New York Times as a ‘towering achievement’, Kavalier & Clay was a bestseller. It won Chabon – an exuberant, funny, warm-hearted writer – a large and devoted following.
Ayelet Waldman is also a bestselling author of both non-fiction and novels, including 2014’s highly regarded Love and Treasure. Her hilarious, controversial essay collection, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace was a major hit of 2010. In a provocative corrective to the idea of selfless, sexless early motherhood, Waldman has been outspoken about the passionate relationship she continues to enjoy with her husband. ‘I love my husband more than I love my children,’ she once asserted. Waldman has described the love between her and Chabon as central to the family dynamic: ‘The children are satellites, beloved but tangential.’
Join this power couple of American literature as they interview each other on family and creativity. Find out how their partnership extends across various aspects of their lives, from raising children, to making marriage work and balancing their literary endeavours.
Featuring
Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon’s first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was originally written for his master’s thesis at U.C. Irvine and became a New York Times bestseller. Chabon’s second novel, Wonder Boys (1995), was also a bestseller, and was made into a critically-acclaimed film featuring actors Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire.
His third novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It won the New York Society Library Prize for Fiction, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal, and the Pulitzer Prize.
Chabon’s most recent novel is Telegraph Avenue (2012). He recently collaborated with acclaimed music producer Mark Ronson as lyricist for Ronson’s album titled Uptown Special (January 2015). Since 1997, he has been living with his wife, Ayelet Waldman, also a novelist, and their children, in Berkeley.
Chabon is also the author of two collections of short stories, A Model World and Other Stories (1990) and Werewolves In Their Youth (1999). His first young adult novel, Summerland, was published in 2002 by Talk Miramax Books and won the 2003 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature.
He recently accepted the position of chairman of the board of directors at the MacDowell Colony. In March 2012 he was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He has written articles and essays, a number of screenplays, including John Carter (March 2012), and teleplays (as well as sharing story credit for Spiderman 2), and edited The Best American Short Stories 2005. Chabon’s story ‘Son of the Wolfman’ was chosen for the 1999 O. Henry collection and for a National Magazine Award.
Chabon’s novella The Final Solution (2004) was awarded the 2005 National Jewish Book Award and also the 2003 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction by The Paris Review.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a hardboiled detective novel set in an alternate world where Israel failed to be born and millions of European Jewish refugees took shelter in Alaska, creating a miniature American Yiddishland. It became a New York Times bestseller immediately upon publication and was nominated for an Edgar Award; it also won the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2008.
In November 2007, his short swashbuckling adventure novel, Gentlemen of the Road, serialized in fifteen chapters in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, was published by Del Rey.
His first children’s book, entitled The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man, illustrated by Jake Parker, was published in September 2011.
He studied at Carnegie-Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at UC Irvine, and has spent most of the past two decades in California, with brief sojourns in Washington State, Florida, and New York State.
Chabon was born in 1963, in Washington, D.C.
Ayelet Waldman
Ayelet Waldman is the author of the forthcoming Love and Treasure (Knopf, April 2014), Red Hook Road and The New York Times bestseller Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace. Her novel Love and Other Impossible Pursuits was adapted into a film called The Other Woman starring Natalie Portman.
Her personal essays and profiles of such public figures as Hillary Clinton have been published in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Vogue, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. Her radio commentaries have appeared on All Things Considered and The California Report.
Ayelet's missives also appear on Facebook and Twitter. Her books are published throughout the world, in countries as disparate as England and Thailand, the Netherlands and China, Russia and Israel, Korea and Italy.