A Forum Conversation with our Favorite Writers: John Irving, Jonathan Franzen and Azar Nafisi

Photo by Nick Caito

Writers John Irving, Jonathan Franzen and Azar Nafisi took the stage at The Bushnell Theater in Hartford on Saturday for a spirited and enlightening conversation about their craft, their lives and the world we live in.



More photos are available on our Facebook page, here.

Video from The Forum will be posted soon!

An Evening with our Favorite Authors: John Irving, Jonathan Franzen and Azar Nafisi

We've been talking a lot about our favorite books by the author panelists for Forum Book Club - John Irving, Jonathan Franzen and Azar Nafisi. I love all these authors, so it's nearly impossible to choose a favorite work by just one of them, but I can say I'm most connected to Irving's work. My mom bought me A Prayer for Owen Meany when I was in 9th grade, and since then I've read everything he's written. I'm keeping my fingers crossed Irving might sign my recent score, a first edition copy of Owen Meany.

Rereading Meany, I was reminded of this beautiful passage:

"When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time -- the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes -- when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever -- there comes another day, and another specifically missing part."

Do you have a favorite passage from one of the panelists' books?

Author John Irving Joins the Forum Book Club Panel!

The Connecticut Forum Announces:
John Irving to Join Azar Nafisi at
The Forum Book Club
Saturday, May 7, 2011

Novelist and screenwriter John Irving is one of the most popular and respected writers in the world. His novels have become American classics; each one is a publishing event.

Irving’s first international bestseller, The World According to Garp, introduced a world of readers to his inventive and expansive style, memorable characters and masterfully woven stories-within-stories. Garp won a National Book Award in 1980 and was made into a film starring Robin Williams.

Since Garp’s release, all of Irving’s novels, including Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and A Widow for One Year, have been translated into over 30 languages and sold tens of millions of copies, and The Cider House Rules was turned into a movie in 1999 that won him the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Irving has three screenplays in-progress; his 12th novel, Last Night in Twisted River, was released in 2009.

Irving has won the O. Henry Award and awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1992 Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma and in 2001 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Watch Irving talk about the "Writer's Craft" below.

Azar Nafisi, Author of "Reading Lolita in Tehran," to speak at the Forum Book Club

The Connecticut Forum Announces:

Azar Nafisi, Author of Reading Lolita in Tehran
will be a Panelist at
Forum Book Club
Saturday, May 7, 2011

Azar Nafisi is best known as the author of the national bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which electrified its readers with a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran and how it affected one university professor and her students. Earning high acclaim and an enthusiastic readership, Reading Lolita in Tehran is an incisive exploration of the transformative powers of fiction in a world of tyranny. The book has spent over 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Nafisi is a Visiting Professor and the Executive Director of Cultural Conversations at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where she is a professor of aesthetics, culture, and literature, and teaches courses on the relation between culture and politics. Nafisi held a fellowship at Oxford University, teaching and conducting a series of lectures on culture and the important role of Western literature and culture in Iran after the revolution in 1979. She taught at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and Allameh Tabatabai before her return to the United States in 1997 - earning national respect and international recognition for advocating on behalf of Iran’s intellectuals, youth, and especially young women. In 1981, she was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil and did not resume teaching until 1987.

Nafisi also conducted workshops in Iran for women students on the relationship between culture and human rights; the material culled from these workshops formed the basis of a new human rights education curriculum. She has lectured and written extensively in English and Persian on the political implications of literature and culture, as well as the human rights of the Iranian women and girls and the important role they play in the process of change for pluralism and an open society in Iran. She has been consulted on issues related to Iran and human rights both by the policy makers and various human rights organizations in the US and elsewhere. She is also involved in the promotion of not just literacy, but of reading books with universal literary value.

Azar Nafisi has written for The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Her cover story, “The Veiled Threat: The Iranian Revolution’s Woman Problem” published in The New Republic (February 22, 1999) has been reprinted into several languages. Additionally, she has published a children’s book (with illustrator Sophie Benini Pietromarchi) BiBi and the Green Voice. Azar Nafisi’s most recent book, Things I Have Been Silent About: Memories, a memoir about her mother, was published in January 2009. She is currently working on a book entitled Republic of the Imagination, which is about the power of literature to liberate minds and peoples.

For more information, see Nafisi's website .

See Nafisi speaking about her home country of Iran