Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference

Did you know that Edward III’s last parliament invented impeachment? That cancel culture in universities actually began at Oxford and in Paris in the 14th Century? That Edward II’s parties would have made Diddy’s freak-offs look like kindergarten parties by comparison? And then there’s the Magna Carta, which supposedly limited the power of the monarchy and established the principle that everyone, including the king, is subject to the law. In this episode – recorded live at the 2025 conference – bestselling British historian Dan Jones, author of such books as The Plantagenets, The Templars, and Henry V, and host
of the podcast This Is History, brings us in riveting fashion into the weirdly prescient now of the Middle Ages.

Photo credit: Ray J. Gadd

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In this episode, recorded live at the 2025 Conference, Salman Rushdie, having received the Sun Valley Writers'
Conference Writer in the World Prize, talks with his fellow novelist and great friend Colum McCann.

Rushdie is a writer who needs no introduction: his name has long been recognized around the world for his brilliant writing and his unfailing courage in defending freedom of speech. He was honored for his extraordinary body of work, both fiction and non-fiction – including his memoir Knife:Meditations after an Attempted Murder, his account of the attempt on his life in August of 2022 and how the love of his wife, the writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths, helped him to survive – and for continuing to write in the face of immeasurable opposition and danger.

Salman Rushdie is many remarkable things, but above all, and always, he is a writer and a teller of stories, and a master at that.       

*Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

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In this episode of Beyond the Page, recorded live at the 2025 Writers Conference, New Yorker staff writer and National Book Award-winning author Evan Osnos dives into the bold-faced, always entertaining, and all too timely topic
of how much is too much in our society—or rather, how much is never enough? Such is the question for the billionaires who now make up America’s ultrarich. Their giant yachts, luxury compounds—and, oh yes, tax schemes—are a source of endless, if alarming, fascination. Osnos talks about his bestselling book The Haves and Have-Yachts and the acquisitive appetites and habits of our new “oligarchs” and how their outsized fortunes are allowing them to hold sway over the elections and the economy.

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BEYOND THE PAGE

Doris Kearns Goodwin: “An Unfinished Love
Story: A Personal History of the 1960s”

In this episode – recorded live at the 2025
Writers Conference – Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of America’s most acclaimed and beloved historians, chronicles her and her late husband Richard's experiences working with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson during the tumultuous 1960s, using personal archives to explore pivotal moments and their own relationship. Her bestselling book, “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s,” offers an intimate, up-close look at figures like JFK,
LBJ, and RFK, weaving together their personal lives with major events like the Civil Rights Movement. But the heart of this wonderful, deeply moving memoir is unquestionably the enduring bond of mutual love and respect between husband and wife across the decades, a bond that embraces their differences as much as their similarities. “Dick was more interested in shaping history,” Doris has said, “and I in figuring out how history was shaped.”

Photo credit – © 2024 AE Television Networks LLC

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In this episode – recorded live at the 2025 Writers Conference – I have an intimate conversation, in front of 1500 people, with the novelist and poet Ocean Vuong. When he was two years old, in 1990, Ocean immigrated with his family from Vietnam. They settled in East Hartford, CT, seven relatives sharing a one-bedroom apartment. His mother worked at a nail salon. When Ocean learned to read at 11, he became the first literate member of his family. Then he became the first to attend college, eventually earning an MFA in writing from NYU. In 2016, he published his debut poetry collection, “Night Sky with Exit Wounds,” which drew immediate attention and acclaim.

In 2019, his first autobiographical novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly
Gorgeous,” written in the form of letters from a Vietnamese American son to his mother, became a bestseller and led to his being awarded a MacArthur Genius grant. By every outward sign, he had seemingly achieved the American Dream as a writer. Then his mother, who’d never been able to read his books, died of cancer. Another celebrated poetry collection, “Time is a Mother,” followed. And now we have Ocean’s magnificent second novel, “The Emperor of Gladness.”

Photo credit – Tom Hines
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