Art, AI, and the Stories We Tell: A Conversation with Ayad Akhtar & Daniel Kehlmann

Описание: What is the role of art in an age of rapid technological change? How does artificial intelligence challenge the way we create and understand stories? Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar and acclaimed German author Daniel Kehlmann discussed the intersection of art, technology, and the human experience. This conversation explored how creativity adapts to shifting cultural and technological landscapes, touching on themes of identity, power, and morality. With insights from two of the literary world’s most compelling voices, this event probed the evolving relationship between storytelling and innovation.

Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Akhtar is the author of Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown & Co.), which was called “a masterpiece” (Publisher’s Weekly) and “a tour de force” (The Washington Post) and selected by The New York Times as one of its ten best books of the year. His first novel, American Dervish (Little, Brown & Co.), was published in over 20 languages.

As a playwright, he has written Junk (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Kennedy Prize for American Drama, Tony nomination); Disgraced (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony nomination); The Who & The What (Lincoln Center); and The Invisible Hand (NYTW; Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, Olivier, and Evening Standard nominations). His play McNeal premiered at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater in the fall of 2024.

Among other honors, Akhtar is the recipient of the Steinberg Playwrighting Award, the Nestroy Award, the Erwin Piscator Award, as well as fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, MacDowell, the Sundance Institute, and Yaddo, where he serves as a Board Director. Additionally, Ayad is a Board Trustee at PEN America, where he served as President from 2020 – 2023. In 2021, Akhtar was named the New York State Author, succeeding Colson Whitehead, by the New York State Writers Institute.

Daniel Kehlmann, born in Munich in 1975, has been awarded the Candide Prize, the Per Olov Enquist Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Thomas Mann Prize, and the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize, among others, for his work. His novel Measuring the World was one of the most successful German novels of the post-war period, and his novel Tyll was also on the bestseller lists for months and made it onto the shortlist for the International Booker Prize. Daniel Kehlmann lives in Berlin and New York.

Moderated by Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor in Chief, The Atlantic, trustee and 2015 fellow, American Academy in Berlin.

Welcome remarks by Daniel Benjamin, President, American Academy in Berlin; Karla Mäder, Head of Dramaturgy, Deutsches Theater

In cooperation with Deutsches Theater
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