In today’s episode, author Paul Harding sits down with Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts and Allie Salazar Gonzales, Development Manager at Freedom Reads. Harding reads from his novel This Other Eden, which was shortlisted for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize, the first major US literary prize awarded exclusively by incarcerated judges. This Other Eden takes place on Apple Island, where the Honey family, descended from the formerly-enslaved Benjamin Honey, has lived for generations alongside Irish immigrants and other people trying to create a new home for themselves. Based on the real story of Malaga Island off the coast of Maine, Paul vividly captures the beauty of this island community and its struggle against forced displacement by mainland officials. In this episode, Harding explores the idea of writing into a literary canon and shares his intentions behind the sentence-level construction of his novel. Harding reflects on the process of writing, creating characters, and, of course, what reading means for freedom.
Paul is the author of three novels, Tinkers, Enon and This Other Eden. Tinkers won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Paul has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and PEN America. He has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Michener Center for Writers, and Harvard University. He is currently a distinguished professor of creative writing at Emerson College in Boston.
