8: Writing Beyond Borders – A Conversation with Michael David Lukas

Michael David Lukas has been a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a night-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv, a student at the American University of Cairo, and a waiter at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. He is the author of two novels, The Oracle of Stamboul and The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, as well as a contributor to the The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, National Geographic Traveler, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lives in Oakland and teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University.  In this episode, we discuss Michael’s books, in particular a forthcoming historical/speculative novel about the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the marvelous capacity of speculative fiction to generate nuanced discussions of complex and contentious conflicts, present and past.