A peek at lit fest lineup

Brian Sandford, The Santa Fe New Mexican
·2 min read

Dec. 30—Call it a prologue.

The Santa Fe International Literary Festival will release its full roster of authors in January, when tickets will go on sale, but it offered a December preview to mailing list members. The festival is May 19-21 at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center.

The festival, billed as a celebration of a shared love of writing and ideas, will include lectures, walking tours with authors, a youth poetry slam, and excursions to locations beyond the city. For more information, go to sfinternationallitfest.org. Last year's inaugural festival, which didn't yet have "International" in the title, attracted a slate of writers including two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead (The Underground Railroad, Harlem Shuffle); bestselling author John Grisham (A Time to Kill, The Firm); Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild, Under the Banner of Heaven); and Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale, Alias Grace).

The recently announced preliminary list for 2023 is at least as impressive. It features:

—Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of The Man Who Could Move Clouds, a 2022 National Book Award finalist, and Fruit of the Drunken Tree, a 2018 New York Times Editors' Choice.

—Jennifer Egan, author of The Candy House, which was among The New York Times' 10 Best Books of 2022, and A Visit From the Goon Squad, a 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner.

—Gillian Flynn, author of Sharp Objects and Gone Girl. According to The Washington Post, as of 2016 Gone Girl had sold more than 15 million copies. The book was adapted into a 2014 film, with screenplay by Flynn, starring Rosamund Pike, Emily Ratajkowski, and Ben Affleck.

—John Irving, author of bestsellers like A Prayer for Owen Meany and The World According to Garp, which won a National Book Award for Fiction Paperback in 1980. Five of his books were turned into films: Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, Simon Birch (partly based on A Prayer for Owen Meany), The Cider House Rules, and The Door in the Floor (from A Widow for One Year).

—Laila Lalami, author of The Moor's Account, which won the 2015 American Book, Arab American Book and Hurston-Wright Legacy awards, and The Other Americans, which won the 2019 Joyce Carol Oates Prize and 2020 Arab American Book Award for Fiction.

—Namwali Serpell, a winner of the 2020 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize and author of The Furrows, one of the Times' 10 Best Books of 2022, and The Old Drift, which won the 2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

—David Treuer, author of Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (2012) and The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (2019).

—Ed Yong, author of An Immense World, one of the Times' Top Books of 2022, and the 2016 bestseller I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life.