Great names of international literature guide us through their lives, their cities, and their art.
We begin in Princeton, where we meet author Edmund Keeley at the university where he directed the Department of Modern Greek Literature for 40 years. A writer, essayist, and translator, Keeley helped shift international focus from ancient Greece to the modern Greek world.
In New York City, Antaios Chrysostomidis and Mikela Chartoulari visit Jonathan Franzen at his home. Winner of the National Book Award, the most prestigious literary prize in the U.S., Franzen speaks about his greatest source of inspiration: the family.
In London, The Beacons of Our Time meet with Hilary Mantel. Twice awarded the Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), Mantel shares her life experiences, the characters she chooses for her fiction, and the way she narrates historical events.
In Paris, the show paints a portrait of Pierre Assouline — a cosmopolitan man of letters, former editor of major literary journals, and biographer of figures such as Simenon, Gallimard, and Hergé.
In Berlin, we find Aris Fioretos, a writer of Greek descent who was born in Gothenburg and lives between Stockholm and Berlin. To describe the literary universe he inhabits, Fioretos says: “I have a Greek spine, an Austrian nervous system, and a Swedish language.”
Back in New York, Irish-born writer Colum McCann tells the story of how, at 21, he decided to cycle across the United States for 18 months. He speaks about his novels Dancer, inspired by Rudolf Nureyev, and Zoli, which has been translated into 25 languages.

In the outskirts of Washington, in Silver Spring—near impoverished Black neighborhoods where crime rates soar, where dealers, prostitutes, and gangs enforce their own laws—lives George Pelecanos, drawing inspiration from this environment for his hard-hitting crime novels.

A second-generation Greek-American, with a father from Sparta who owned a fast-food joint in downtown D.C., and three adopted children from Brazil and Guatemala, Pelecanos is a writer who masterfully blends literary quality with commercial appeal, both in his books and in his scripts for the acclaimed crime series The Wire. Though he speaks only a little Greek, he frequently features Greek-American (as well as African-American) protagonists and stands out for the strong social lens through which he tells his stories—stories that expose the darker underbelly of the American dream.

His creative home base remains Washington, D.C., with its deep racial and class divides, as well as the port of Baltimore, which serves as a recurring setting for his television work. Critics have rightfully hailed him as one of the leading voices in contemporary American crime fiction.

In his conversation with The Beacons of Our Time, Pelecanos reveals to the audience an unknown, gritty world—and also the personal journey of a Greek-American who had no ties to academia, turned to writing relatively late, and climbed to the top solely through his own strength and relentless hard work. Naturally, the discussion also includes his passionate support for Barack Obama.