Writing the 9/11 Decade: Reportage and the Evolution of the Novel

Writing the 9/11 Decade investigates the relation of the novel to reportage, and the role of both
in shaping culture, by looking at novelists' journalistic responses to the September 11 attacks.

Journalist and academic Charlie Lee-Potter argues that novelists were entrapped by the
expectation that they would provide an immediate non-fiction response to 9/11. Beginning with
an examination of the sometimes mawkish writing that emerged in the days after the attacks,
Writing the 9/11 Decade traces the evolution of literary journalism – in writers such as Ian
McEwan, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Mohsin Hamid and Nadeem Aslam – into new methods
of subsuming the disaster, while attempting to stand apart from it. It includes interviews with
novelists such as Richard Ford, Amy Waldman and Kamila Shamsie, as well as the only longform
interview granted by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, who is
himself a 9/11 survivor.

In assessing the novel's capacity to respond to and contain an unimagined traumatic event,
Writing the 9/11 Decade stands as a contemporary history of the form.