LITERATURE + LECTURES

Five acclaimed authors, John Best, Anthony Horowitz, Sylvia Nasar, Calvin Trillin and Colson Whitehead will headline the Thirty-Second Annual Houston Chronicle Book & Author Dinner. The event, which benefits the literacy programs of the Houston Chronicle’s Readers are Leaders Foundation, will be held on Sunday, November 13, at CityCentre Norris Conference Center Red Oak Ballroom.

About the Featured Speakers:

John Besh: A native of southern Louisiana, Chef John Besh has dedicated himself to the culinary riches and traditions of his home. His seven New Orleans restaurants — August (a James Beard Award-winner), Besh Steak, Lüke, La Provence, American Sector, Domenica and The Soda Shop — celebrate the bounty of the region. San Antonio is now home to Lüke River Walk, Besh’s first restaurant outside of Louisiana. In his upcoming cookbook, My Family Table: A Passionate Plea for Home Cooking, Besh invites us into his home and shows us how to put fresh, healthy food on our own family tables.

Anthony Horowitz: The back story on this British author is straight out of Dickens. He grew up in wealth and splendor, but soon after his father transferred all their money to a secret Swiss bank account, his father died and the money was never recovered. The young Horowitz also attended a boarding school where the headmaster repeatedly flogged the boys. Perhaps this is where he got ideas for his Alex Rider books, a New York Times best-selling series written for young adults and featuring a 14-year-old British spy. Horowitz also caused a literary sensation in January when it was announced he’d been commissioned to write a new Sherlock Holmes book. It’s the first time the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has ever authorized a new Sherlock Holmes mystery. The House of Silk, which is narrated by Watson, will be released in November.

Sylvia Nasar: A professor of business journalism at Columbia University, Sylvia Nasar is best known for A Beautiful Mind, her biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was made into a film starring Russell Crowe. Trained as an economist, Nasar has written for the New York Times, Fortune and U.S. News & World Report. Her fall 2011 book, Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius, gathers the great minds of modern economics — John Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx, Milton Friedman and others — into a sweeping drama about how ideas can transform the world.

Calvin Trillin: A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1963, Calvin Trillin is also the “deadline poet” for The Nation. A master storyteller and essayist, Trillin is likely to riff on just about anything: food, holidays, politics, you name it. His tribute to his late wife, About Alice, was a best-seller. Although he hails from the Midwest, Trillin often finds himself writing about Texas – so much so that he published a collection of essays, Trillin on Texas, earlier this year. He’s got another collection coming in September called Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff.

Colson Whitehead: Colson Whitehead’s most recent novel, Sag Harbor, follows a group of teens around an African-American enclave on Long Island in the summer of 1985. Sag Harbor was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award. Whitehead’s 2001 novel, John Henry Days, investigated the steel-driving man of American folklore and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The Intuitionist (1999), his first book, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, Whitehead has a new book coming this October called Zone One – a playful and chilling story about zombies. He lives in Brooklyn.