Fernanda Eberstadt talks to George Prochnik

Novelist Fernanda Eberstadt explores the lives of men and women who have used their wounded or stigmatised bodies to challenge society and reflects on her own story and that of her mother, whose illness-scarred body first led her to seek the connections between beauty, belief and the truths taught by bodily and psychic pain.

Eberstadt looks at lives including Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes, who slept, taught and had sex in a public square, 20th-century prophets of bodily freedom filmmaker-poet Pier Paolo Pasolini and Michel Foucault, the Russian punk feminist group Pussy Riot, and the political artist Piotr Pavlensky, who nailed his scrotum to the pavement of Red Square to protest Vladimir Putin’s tyranny. She asks what drives individuals to risk pain or death in the name of freedom and what can we learn from them.

Eberstadt is author of five novels and of a memoir about her friendship with a family of Rom musicians in southern France. Here she talks to writer George Prochnik, author of Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem.

Part of the festival’s programme of American literature and culture.