Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on March 27, 2013.

Russell Banks has written more than 10 novels including Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter, as well as the story collection The Angel on the Roof. His The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction were adapted into celebrated feature films. Banks’ latest novel, Lost Memory of Skin, tells the story of “the Kid,” who at 22, after doing time for a liaison with an underage girl, is forbidden to live where children might gather. Michael Ondaatje calls Banks, “the uncompromising moral voice of our time.”

Banks has made a life’s work of charting the causes and effects of the terrible things “normal” men can and will do. He writes with an intensely focused empathy and a compassionate sense of humor that help to keep readers, if not his characters, afloat through the misadventures and outright tragedies in his books. For more information on Mr. Banks, click here.

In this episode he is introduced by Stona Fitch and then spoke. The companion Conversation may be found here.

Additional photos of this event are available on Flickr.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to audio recordings of this event there.