Perhaps best known for The World According to Garp, a National Book Award winner turned cult film (directed by George Roy Hill), John Irving is the author of 12 novels, including the American classics A Prayer for Owen Meany, and The Hotel New Hampshire. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules – a film with seven Academy Award nominations. His forthcoming novel, In One Person, is a first-person book that explores the life of a bisexual man. The multi-talented Irving was a competitive wrestler for twenty years and was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1992.
Michael Krasny is the host of Forum on KQED FM. He is a Professor of English at San Francisco State University and author of Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic’s Quest and Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life. His many interviews for City Arts & Lectures include Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Isaac B. Singer, Colson Whitehead and Justice Stephen Breyer.