Author: Debut Novels

Admired and best-selling authors offer advice and discuss their latest books. 

Be among the first to discover these breakout writers at our Debut Novels author panel with David Baerwald, The Fire Agent; Meg Charlton, Voyagers; Yosha Gunasekera, The Midnight Taxi; and Hafeez Lakhani, Abundance.

David Baerwald is a platinum-selling musician who has collaborated with Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Rikki Lee Jones, Sheryl Crow, and Bruce Springsteen, among others. Seven years ago, when fires in LA led him to evacuate his home, he began for the first time to look through his grandfather’s diaries, photographs, and letters, and became obsessed with a family history he’d never known. That obsession led him to sell his music catalogue to underwrite the years it took him to create The Fire Agent, his first novel.

Meg Charlton is a writer based in New York City. In addition to her debut novel Voyagers, her writing has appeared in The Yale Review, Slate, Lux, Atlas Obscura and Vice, as well as the anthology Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us. Her writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and covered in Indiewire, Above the Law, and Australian National Radio's Future Tense. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and teaches at Sackett Street Writers.

Yosha Gunasekera is a Sri Lankan-American attorney who represents people who have spent decades behind bars for crimes they did not commit. She teaches a course at Princeton University focused on wrongful conviction and exoneration. Yosha is a former Manhattan public defender and has written and spoken extensively on the criminal legal system. She lives in New York City with her husband. Yosha was named a Publishers Weekly Writer to Watch and a Most Anticipated Read by Marie Claire, Goodreads, Book Riot, and more.

Hafeez Lakhani was born in Hyderabad, India and raised in suburban South Florida. His fiction and essays have appeared in Crazyhorse, Exposition Review, Salt Hill, Tikkun, The Cortland Review, and The Southern Review, among others, and have garnered fellowships from PEN America and The Center for Fiction. He was twice recognized with a Notable Essay in Best American Essays and twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. After publishing his essay “If We Show That We Like They Make More Mainga” he was profiled by the Huffington Post as one of “Eight Fantastic New Writers to Look Out For”. His debut novel Abundance is a People Magazine Most Anticipated Book of 2026. It follows five members of an American Muslim family across Miami, New York, Monaco, and Gujarat, each grappling with questions of ambition versus destiny as the matriarch decides whether to accept an organ transplant.

Hosted by Ilana Levine, actress and podcaster at Little Known Facts with Ilana Levine.