After a long career, Sigrid Nunez achieved worldwide recognition with the success of her eighth book, The Friend (Riverhead Books, 2018), which won the National Book Award and was translated into some 30 languages. The novel established Nunez as one of the most lucid American writers on loss, friendship, and grief, as seen in books such as Sempre Susan (Atlas Books, 2011), a memoir of her friend and mentor Susan Sontag, which has become a classic for understanding the lights and shadows of intellectual relationships. Or What Are You Going Through (Riverhead Books, 2020), her novel about the end of life and the right to decide one’s own death, which Pedro Almodóvar adapted into La habitación de al lado [The Room Next Door] (2024).  

At Kosmopolis, Sigrid Nunez talks with writer Marta Carnicero about her mechanisms for turning personal experience into universal experience through everyday storytelling. A space to reflect on friendship as a literary theme and on the strength of the connections that sustain us.