An Evening With Rebecca Makkai

Time: 7:30pm-9:00pm
Date: January 29, 2025
Location: Butler University’s Schrott Center for the Arts

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to hear acclaimed novelist Rebecca Makkai read from and discuss her award-winning work at Butler University’s Schrott Center for the Arts on Wednesday, January 29, 2025 at 7:30PM as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series. At the end of her reading, Makkai will take questions from the audience and sign books for those interested. The event is free to the public with no ticket required.

Rebecca Makkai is the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of 5 works of fiction including the The Great Believers, a novel that was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and the 2018 National Book Award. Set in Chicago at the height of the American AIDS epidemic, as well as in 2015 Paris, the novel was one of the New York Times‘ Top Ten Books of 2018, it also won the ALA Carnegie Medal, the LA Times Book Prize, the Stonewall Award, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, the Midwest Independent Booksellers Award, the Clark Fiction Prize, and the Chicago Review of Books Award. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Michael Cunningham called the novel a “page turner… An absorbing and emotionally riveting story about what it’s like to live during times of crisis.” Her first novel, The Borrower, was a Booklist Top Ten Debut, an Indie Next pick, and an O Magazine selection. Her second novel, The Hundred-Year House, is the story of a haunted house and a haunted family, told in reverse; Library Journal called it “stunning, ambitious, readable and intriguing.” It was chosen as the Chicago Writers Association’s novel of the year, and received raves in The New York Times Book Review and elsewhere.

Makkai’s’s work has been translated into over 20 languages, and her short fiction has been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize XLI (2017), The Best American Short Stories 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 and 2009, New Stories from the Midwest and Best American Fantasy, and featured on Public Radio International’s Selected Shorts and This American Life.

Makkai was an elementary Montessori teacher for the twelve years before the publication of her first book. She holds an MA in Literature from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English.