This is a guest post by Literary Initiatives intern Amanda Brown.
The Library of Congress National Book Festival will celebrate its 25th year on September 6, 2025. For this year’s festival information, visit the 2025 National Book Festival website.
To honor the occasion, we are taking the 24 weeks leading up to this year’s festival at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center to highlight two videos each week from past National Book Festivals, from the festival’s first year in 2001 to 2024. Each week, we’ll highlight a past festival year. We hope you enjoy scrolling through the past with us! Check out videos from the first 2001 festival here.
Marilynne Robinson is the author of five novels including “Home,” winner of the Orange Prize (UK) and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and “Gilead,” winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her five nonfiction books include “The Givenness of Things: Essays” and “The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought.”
Robinson’s many other honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Fund, the National Humanities Medal and the American Academy of Religion in the Arts Award. Robinson, a professor emeritus of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2016, she received the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
Robinson has been writing about people who live in small towns and rural settings for decades and has reached a deep understanding of family, faith and intricacies of being human. Listen to her read from “Home” to hear her appreciation for voice-driven stories and humanitarian approach to seeing the world.
Marilynne Robinson starts speaking at 5:00, and the video proceeds as follows:
- 5:17: Robinson sets the stage for the excerpt she reads from “Home”
- 29:05: Q&A Session begins:
- 29:28: “Gilead” and “Home” as America’s great reformed novels
- 24:00: Writing an epistolary novel
- 36:06: Physiological difference in writing fiction vs. nonfiction
Kate DiCamillo is a children’s author who has published over 35 books, including “Because of Winn Dixie,” “The Tale of Despereaux,” “The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane,” the “Mercy Watson” series, “The Magician’s Elephant,” “Flora & Ulysses” and “Ferris.”
DiCamillo’s contributions have been recognized with numerous honors, including a National Book Award nomination. DiCamillo has won two Newbery Awards, making her one of seven authors who have been honored with this award twice. Her books have sold more than 44 million copies. Of all her titles, four have been developed into films and two have been adapted into musical settings. She served as the Library of Congress National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature from 2014 to 2015.
DiCamillo speaks to the child in each of us—the one still looking for a place to belong, still hoping for wonder. Her stories, filled with animals, oddballs and brave hearts, have traveled far—into schools, homes and libraries—because they speak to something true in all of us. In every story, she gives us a reason to believe that kindness matters and that love, even in its simplest forms, can save us.
Kate DiCamillo starts reading an excerpt of “The Magician’s Elephant” right away and the video then proceeds as follows:
- 4:30: Q & A Session begins
- 6:10: “The Magician’s Elephant”
- 7:12: “The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane”
- 8:53: The Unlikely hero
- 10:13: Characters in her stories
- 11:56: Becoming a writer
- 13:59: “Librarians saw me”
Come back next week for highlights from 2010!