Back in 2009, novelist Katie Kitamura heard Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, on the radio, speaking at his trial at The Hague’s International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. “It was one of those really destabilizing moments,” she told 13 students in Frost Library on a snowy Saturday in February. “I could hear the ego and monstrosity of this person, and I could also hear his incredible rhetorical skill. Something in that moral gray zone grabbed me.” 

Kitamura was on campus for the seventh annual LitFest, which also featured Pulitzer Prize winners Natalie Diaz and Viet Than Nguyen; Elizabeth McCracken, who, like Kitamura, was longlisted for a 2021 National Book Award; journalists Vann Newkirk and David Graham; and others. 

These writers spoke in Johnson Chapel and sat in on classes. Four of them, including Kitamura, also offered “craft talks” on how they create their narratives—while coaching students on how to make their own stories come alive. 

That craft talk is where Kitamura recalled the radio segment, saying it resulted in her novel Intimacies, the unnerving story of an ICC translator. She asked the students in Frost to take five minutes to find a news item that intrigued them, and then consider ways to alchemize it into fiction. They spent the rest of the session workshopping those ideas.

A woman in a mask talking to someone with piles of books in front of her
“Something in that moral gray zone grabbed me,” Kitamura said of the inspiration for her latest novel.

Takudzwanashe “Michael” Mhuru ’24 alighted on a rally against proposed Zimbabwean reparations for white colonialists whose land was reclaimed by the country’s citizens. Kitamura asked what angle he’d take, what timeline he’d choose and how he’d confront the idea of colonialism. Mhuru decided he’d work with five characters, each with different opinions on reparations. “That’s incredibly rich,” Kitamura said. “One of the things the novel is so good at is capturing the tension between the individual and the social structure they operate in.”

Josh Choi ’22 chose an article about a Ukrainian man living abroad who went home to fight Russia, plus a photograph of another man, crying at the thought of fighting. Choi wondered if he could fit these two characters together in a narrative. “I like how you have two characters, and that schism,” said Kitamura.

Natalie Landau ’22 found a news item about crimes at Mexican resort towns. She thought about an outsider-insider clash that could touch on race and class privilege. Landau was concerned about how to keep the characters human, not stereotypical. “How do you keep characters from being instrumentalized?” Kitamura asked the class. “The answer is: complexity.”

Other students toyed with conceiving fictional treatments of the Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva and the Ukrainian woman who gave sunflower seeds to Russian soldiers.

“Feel free to move as far away from your source material as you like,” Kitamura said, noting that she never wrote about Charles Taylor specifically. The germination is the point: “Listen to whatever set of ideas the item may have provoked in you.”

Then she thanked the 13 students for being so generous, and sat down to sign copies of her book, which began when she turned on the radio 13 years ago.


Photograph by Maria Stenzel