Thanks to The School of Writing at The New School, as well as the tireless efforts of their students and faculty, we are able to provide interviews with each of the NBCC Awards Finalists for the publishing year 2013 in our 30 Books 2013 series.
Eric Dean Wilson, on behalf of the School of Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Lawrence Wright, via phone, about his book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (Knopf), which is among the final five selections, in the category of Nonfiction, for the 2013 NBCC awards.
Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He is the author of a novel, God’s Favorite, and has also authored six previous books of nonfiction—City Children, Country Summer; In the New World; Saints and Sinners; Remembering Satan; Twins; and The Looming Tower. The Looming Tower received many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. He is also a screenwriter and a playwright. He and his wife are longtime residents of Austin, Texas.
Eric Dean Wilson is a second-year MFA Creative Writing student in Nonfiction. His work has recently appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMBlog, Seneca Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a collection of essays around the fear of death.