The Center for Fiction Presents Yann Martel on Son of Nobody with Ellen McLaughlin

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Tuesday, 7:00 pm EDT March 31, 2026

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

Don’t miss Yann Martel, author of the international sensation Life of Pi, discussing his new novel, Son of Nobody, in conversation with award-winning playwright and actor Ellen McLaughlin (The Greek Plays 2).

Son of Nobody is a brilliant and inventive retelling of the Trojan War through the eyes of two unlikely narrators: an ancient soldier and a modern scholar. At the heart of the novel lies The Psoad, an epic poem that follows Psoas of Midea, a goatherd’s son who leaves his wife and family to fight at Troy. Centuries later, the book’s alternate protagonist—a Canadian academic named Harlow Donne—uncovers the poem’s remnants while studying at Oxford, having left behind a wife and daughter of his own. As he translates the text, a quiet, almost mystical dialogue forms between ancient and modern lives, revealing the perennial ache of homesickness, ambition, longing, and regret.

Blending myth, history, and domestic intimacy, Son of Nobody moves effortlessly from the plains of Troy to the halls of Oxford, and from ancient verse to contemporary footnotes. It offers a fresh angle on the Trojan War—one centered not on kings and demigods, but on ordinary people whose stories rarely survive the centuries.

Martel and McLaughlin’s rich discussion will consider the enduring power of literature to bridge between worlds ancient, contemporary, factual, and mythical. A book signing will follow the event.

Ticket price inclusive of sales tax if applicable.

Featuring

Yann Martel

Yann Martel

Yann Martel is the author of Life of Pi, the international bestseller that won the 2002 Booker Prize and was adapted to the screen in the Oscar–winning film by Ang Lee. He lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Photo Credit: Emma Love
Ellen McLaughlin

Ellen McLaughlin

Ellen McLaughlin’s plays have received numerous national and international productions. They include Days and Nights Within, A Narrow Bed, Infinity’s House, Iphigenia and Other Daughters, Tongue of a Bird, The Trojan Women, Helen, The Persians, Oedipus, Ajax in Iraq, Kissing the Floor, Septimus and Clarissa, The Names We Gave Him, Penelope, Blood Moon, Mercury’s Footpath, and The Oresteia. Producers include: The Public Theater, The National Actors Theatre, Classic Stage Company, Ripe Time, Prototype Festival, One Year Lease, Flux Theatre Ensemble, and New York Theatre Workshop (NYC), Actors Theatre of Louisville, The Actors’ Gang (LA), Intiman Theatre (Seattle), Almeida Theatre (London), The Mark Taper Forum (LA), Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Getty Villa, Guthrie Theater, and Shakespeare Theatre Company (D.C.), among other venues. Grants and awards include: Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, Great American Play Contest, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the NEA, the Writers’ Award from the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund, the Berilla Kerr Award for Playwrighting, and the TCG/Fox Foundation Resident Actor Fellowship for Ajax in Iraq at the A.R.T. Institute. She has taught playwriting at Barnard College since 1995. Other teaching posts include Bread Loaf School of English, Yale Drama School, and Princeton University. Ms. McLaughlin is also an actor. She is most well known for having originated the part of the Angel in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, appearing in every U.S. production from its earliest workshops through its original Broadway run.

Featured Book

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Son of Nobody

By Yann Martel

Published by W. W. Norton & Company

PURCHASE

The Psoad is an Ancient Greek epic in free verse that follows a goatherd’s son, Psoas of Midea, who leaves his wife and family to fight with the Greeks at Troy. This commoner’s story was lost to time—until Harlow Donne, a Canadian academic who has left his own wife and daughter behind to study at Oxford, discovers its relics nearly thirty centuries later.

As sole translator and interpreter of The Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, a personal message to his beloved child appears in the ancient text, like a palimpsest. Despite the thousands of years and hundreds of miles that separate Psoas and Harlow, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of love, ambition, and grief.

Son of Nobody takes readers from the plains of Troy to the halls of Oxford, from the classical to the contemporary, from ancient verses to modern footnotes. It is a dazzling, masterful feat of myth, history, and domesticity that explores how stories become facts, the price we pay to share them, and how we live—then, now, always.