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Credit: Sydney Writers’ Festival/Instagram

As testament to the strength of this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival lineup, two featured writers, Colson Whitehead and Hisham Matar, have been anointed 2017 Pulitzer Prize winners in the categories of Fiction and Biography respectively. They’ll be appearing throughout the festival at a number of events ranging from panel discussions to one-on-one interviews; Whitehead has also announced the he’ll be making appearances in Melbourne and Adelaide for those unable to attend the festival in the last week of May. 

In Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, recipient of the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and a New York Times bestseller, the author replaced the metaphorical Underground Railroad of the Antebellum South  – a system whereby slaves were moved between safe houses under the cover of night on their journey toward free land in pre-Civil War America – with an actual train. Whitehead will appear in conversation with the editor of the New York Times Book Review, Pamela Paul, as well as on a panel titled Blerd Culture opposite Roxane Gay, Nayuka Gorrie, Miranda Tapsell and Cleverman creator Ryan Griffen. He’s also slated to appear on a panel discussing the first four months of Trump’s presidency alongside Slate’s editor-in-chief, Julia Turner, data editor of The Guardian US Mona Chalabi and the phenomenal writer-turned-novelist George Saunders. 

Matar’s The Return documents the author’s search for clues about the fate of his missing father, who, when Matar was 19, was kidnapped in Cairo and taken to a prison in Libya. They never saw each other again. Matar will appear on quite a few panels, including Origin Story, wherein participants reveal the stories that made them want to become writers; Resist!, discussing the art’s role in reflecting the problems of the world; and A Murder In The Family, wherein panellists including Susan Faludi and Nadja Spiegelman will discuss the experience of drawing from their own lives to create their work.

The remainder of the program really is fascinating, and is worth checking out in full here.

The Sydney Writers’ Festival takes place from May 22 until May 28 at various venues throughout the city. More information is available here.

Tile and cover image: Lloyd Bishop/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images