25 Years of the National Book Festival: Highlights from 2021

This is a guest post by Junior Fellow Eleanor Ball. 

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 weeks leading up to this year’s festival at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center to highlight two videos per post from past National Book Festivals, from the festival’s first year in 2001 to 2024. Each time we’ll highlight a past festival year, with one adult book event and one children’s book event from that year. To see the other videos from the 2021 festival, please go here. We hope you enjoy scrolling through the past with us! Check out videos from the first 2001 festival here.

Kristin Hannah is the author of 20 novels, including “The Nightingale,” a selection of the Reese Witherspoon Book Club in 2023, as well as the New York Times No. 1 bestsellers “The Great Alone,” and “The Four Winds”—the latter of which was featured at the 2021 National Book Festival and named the best book of 2021 by the Book of the Month club. Her novel “Firefly Lane” was adapted into a Netflix TV series.

Maggie Shipstead is the New York Times bestselling author of “Astonish Me” and “Seating Arrangements,” which was the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her recent novel “Great Circle” was featured at the 2021 National Book Festival. Shipstead is a graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

In this conversation with Washington Post book critic Ron Charles, Hannah and Shipstead discuss the importance of uplifting women’s history, how they research historical fiction and why novels matter today.

Hannah and Shipstead are introduced at 1:00, and the conversation proceeds as follows:

1:53 Researching historical fiction
7:45 Discussion of “The Four Winds”
10:33 Discussion of “Great Circle”
14:00 The power of stories
19:58 Live Q&A begins

Lupita Nyong’o has starred in movies such as “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” “Black Panther,” “Us,” “Black Is King,” “12 Years a Slave” and “East River.” She has received numerous honors for her performances, including an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, an Obie Award and a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress. Nyong’o is also the author of the picture book “Sulwe,” which was a New York Times No. 1 bestseller and the recipient of an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Children’s Literary Work.

In this conversation with former Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, Nyong’o discusses the inspiration for “Sulwe,” her personal struggles with self-image as a child and her experiences making films such as “12 Years a Slave,” “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and “Black Panther.”

Nyong’o is introduced at 0:35, and the video proceeds as follows:

1:18 The inspiration for “Sulwe”
3:48 Colorism in Hollywood
8:45 Reflections on her career
11:20 The power of books to inspire and connect  
15:09 Bonus content: Library of Congress Luso-Hispanic collection highlights

Come back next week for highlights from 2022!