An Afternoon with Katie Kitamura

An acclaimed actress meets a younger man for dinner in Manhattan. Is he her son? Her lover? Can a story ever truly have just one interpretation? A hypnotic book, one of the most talked-about of the year, exploring the power and fluidity of the roles we are called to play in our lives. A story that invites us to reconsider our expectations and realize that things are almost never what they seem.

Her novel “The Audition”, a finalist for the 2025 Booker Prize and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, was included in the top 10 books of the year by TIME Magazine and Publishers Weekly. It was also named Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, The New Yorker, NPR, The New York Public Library, Vogue, The Guardian, Kirkus, and other media outlets.

The author of the book, which was also featured on Barack Obama’s favourite books of the year list, is coming to Thessaloniki for a live interview in front of her readers. With stunning craftsmanship, Kitamura—a Princeton University graduate and professor of creative writing at New York University—challenges our preconceptions about love, art, and identity in “The Audition”, while masterfully subverting our very perception of how a novel should unfold. If all the world’s a stage, Kitamura reminds us that we never stop auditioning for our roles.