Author Tracy Kidder

Author and journalist Tracy Kidder, whose honors have included a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, will read and discuss his work Nov. 12 at the University of Indianapolis.

Admission is free to the event, which begins at 7 p.m. in UIndy Hall of Schwitzer Student Center, 1400 E. Hanna Ave. The appearance, which includes a Q&A session and book signing, is presented by the university’s Sutphin Lectures in the Humanities series in association with the Kellogg Writers Series.

Considered a master of creative nonfiction and literary journalism, Kidder won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Award for Nonfiction with his second book, The Soul of a New Machine, which follows a team of researchers in the early 1980s struggling to design a new microcomputer.

He also wrote the 2003 New York Times bestseller and Notable Book Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World, a biography of the physician and anthropologist who fights infectious disease around the globe. Farmer himself appeared at UIndy earlier this month to speak on global health issues.

Other recent books have included 2005’s My Detachment: A Memoir, reflecting on Kidder’s 1967-1969 tour of duty in Vietnam; 2009’s Strength in What Remains, an account of a Burundian refugee’s search for purpose in the United States; and 2013’s Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, coauthored with his longtime editor Richard Todd. He also has published collections of short fiction and written many nonfiction articles for periodicals including The Atlantic and The New Yorker.