Poets & Writers Theater

“Language is tough. Using the right words is so important to me.” Paul Beatty, author of the Man Booker Prize–winning novel, The Sellout (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), speaks about the labor of writing and his advice to students on Late Night With Seth Meyers.

"I suppose that's exactly the problem—I wasn't raised to know any better." Novelist and poet Paul Beatty reads from his novel The Sellout (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), which was awarded the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. Beatty is also a finalist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize.

“I don’t want to get all dramatic—‘writing saved my life’ or anything like that—but writing’s given me a life.” In this video, Paul Beatty talks about freedom and censorship within writing in his acceptance speech for the 2016 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Beatty, who was honored for his novel The Sellout (Oneworld, 2016), is the first American author to win the award.