Imagining Illness: Pulitzer Prize Winners on Truth and Fact in Narrative
Hosted by NYU Center for the Humanities
Video of the "Imagining Illness" event held February 16, 2016.
What are the responsibilities of the creative writer when treating real-world questions in the sciences or medicine?
Paul Harding, author of TINKERS (2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) and David Oshinsky, author of POLIO: An American Story (2006 Pulitzer Prize for History) discuss the many ways in which the authorial imagination can evoke and engage with the body and illness in fiction and nonfiction.
Paul Harding is the author of two novels about multiple generations of a New England family: the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers and Enon. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts, he earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Harding has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
David Oshinsky, PhD, is the director of the Division of Medical Humanities at NYU School of Medicine and a professor in the NYU Department of History. Polio: An American Story, won both the Pulitzer Prize in History and the Hoover Presidential Book Award. In 2009, PBS aired a documentary based upon this work, “The Polio Crusade,” and he received the Dean’s Medal from the Bloomberg-Johns Hopkins School of Public Health for his distinguished contributions to the field.