Writer Adam Johnson is coming to Houston for an event Oct. 15 at the Wortham Center as a part of Inprint’s Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.

Johnson, a novelist and short story writer, won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2012 novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, which envisioned life in the totalitarian state of North Korea.

And he won the National Book Award for his 2015 collection of short stories, Fortune Smiles.

His latest novel, which took him ten years to write, is called The Wayfinder, and its sprawling tale chronicles the lives of those living on Polynesian islands during the Tu’i Tonga Empire centuries ago. A young girl must make an epic journey across the vast open ocean empire to save her people from starvation.

In an interview with Houston Matters producer Michael Hagerty, Johnson talks about how the oral storytelling traditions of the Polynesian people captivated him and how those ancient people navigated so precisely using only celestial guides.

And Johnson, who is a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, discusses how spending so much time studying and meditating upon the history and stories of indigenous peoples who were never colonized made him wonder how his own people’s history might have been different had that been the case in North America.

Riverside.fm/Screen Capture