Nathan Thrall in Conversation With Dr. Layla Saatchi

The Author Series Committee at DPL welcomes Nathan Thrall, winner of 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for A Day in the Life of Abed Salama (Metropolitan Books, 2023). A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine that offers a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth. Joining Nathan will be Wayne State University Assistant Professor of Teaching Dr. Layla Saatchi.

Copies of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama will be available for sale from Detroit's own 27th Letter Books.

About Nathan Thrall: Nathan Thrall received the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for A Day in the Life of Abed Salama (Metropolitan Books, 2023). The book was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, Time, The Economist and fifteen other publications. Thrall is also the author of the critically acclaimed essay collection The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine (Metropolitan Books, 2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books and been translated into more than twenty languages.

Thrall’s writing has been cited in the United Nations Security Council, General Assembly, and Human Rights Council, as well as in reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. He has been described as “one of the best-informed and most trenchant observers of the conflict” (Financial Times), “an American analyst with a severe allergy to conventional wisdom” (Time), and the author of a series of articles “that have defined the new intellectual and political parameters for what is increasingly recognized as Israel-Palestine’s one-state (or post-two-state) reality” (The New York Review of Books).

Thrall has received grants and fellowships from the Open Society Foundations, Middlebury College Language Schools, and The Writers’ Institute. His commentary is often featured in print and broadcast media, including the Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Democracy Now!, The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, PRI, Reuters, Time, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College. He lives in Jerusalem.

About Dr. Layla Saatchi: Dr. Soraya (Layla) Saatchi is an Assistant Professor of Teaching with the Irvin D. Reid Honors College at Wayne State University (WSU). She holds a Masters in Near East and Asian Studies with dual concentrations in Arabic and Islamic legal history from WSU. Her thesis advisor was Dr. May Seikaly, a survivor of the Nakba and author of the book “Haifa: Transformation of an Arab Society, 1918-1939”. Dr. Saatchi's dissertation research focused on the epistemology of disagreement and asked the question whether and how epistemic peers (folks who hold equivalent evidence with respect to a subject) can persistently and reasonably disagree. She is currently developing a novel concept she is calling epistemic fragility that will help explain how and why our public discourse together with our psycho-social needs cause us to resist ideas that are inconsistent with our existing beliefs. Dr. Saatchi is the recipient of several awards including the King Chavez Parks Future Faculty award and is a WSU Humanities Center Fellow.

Questions? Email [email protected]!

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