2022 Preliminary Speaker List
Word is out. The first batch of top global minds coming for the 2022 Charleston Literary Festival has been revealed. This fall, a host of world-class creators and thinkers will descend upon Charleston to explore today's most pressing ideas with guests from near and far. Leading topics will include racial injustice, challenges to democracy, generational trauma, and the survival story of a royal family, among many others. The Festival offers a communal experience where all are welcome to share conversations, ideas, arguments, laughter, and tears. Above all, the Festival symbolizes the power of books to reconnect us.
DISCOVER SOME OF OUR 2022 SPEAKERS BELOW
Sandy Hook is a landmark investigation of the aftermath of a school shooting, the work of Sandy Hook parents who fought to defend themselves, and the truth of their children’s fate against the frenzied distortions of online deniers and conspiracy theorists from The New YorkTimes writer Elizabeth Williamson.
The Palace Papers, Tina Brown, award-winning writer and editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, and The NewYorker, picks up where The Diana Chronicles left off revealing how the royal family reinvented itself after the
traumatic years when Diana’s blazing celebrity ripped through the House of Windsor like a comet.
Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Lessons for Today, Eddie S Glaude Jr., one of the nation's most prominent scholars, is a passionate educator, author, political commentator, and public intellectual who examines the complex dynamics of the American experience. Named one of the best books of the year by Time, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune, Begin Again, is where Glaude finds hope and guidance in James Baldwin as he mixes biography with history, memoir, and poignant analysis of our current moment to reveal the painful cycle of Black resistance and white retrenchment.
By Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks, HORSE is based on the true story of record-breaking 19th-century thoroughbred Lexington, who became America’s greatest stud shire. It is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, the bond between people and animals, and an unfinished reckoning with racial injustice running throughout different periods of American history.
The Latecomer, Jean Hanff Korelitz, The New York Times bestselling author of The Plot, touches on grief and guilt, generational trauma, privilege and race, traditions and religion, and family dynamics. It is a profound and witty family story from an accomplished author known for the depth of her character studies, expertly woven storylines, and plot twists.