HIS MAJESTY’S AIRSHIP with S. C. GWYNNE

12:00 pm - 12:45 pm
| Location of Session: Texas Monthly Tent
Adult Sessions

Start of Signing: 1:00 pm
| Signing Location: Festival Marketplace

My Schedule

About the Event

At the beginning of the 20th century, airships were a symbol of the future. R101 was the largest aircraft ever to have flown and key to linking the far-flung British Empire together – except that the big, steel hydrogen-filled airships were liable to explode. Pulitzer Prize finalist S. C. Gwynne will join us to discuss the doomed tale of the airship and the characters who built, flew, and crashed the ship in His Majesty’s Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine.

About the Author

Photo Credit: Kenny Braun

S.C. Gwynne

S.C. Gwynne is the author of Hymns of the Republic, and the New York Times bestsellers Rebel Yell and Empire of the Summer Moon, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He spent most of his career as a journalist, including stints with TIME as bureau chief, national correspondent, and senior editor, and with Texas Monthly as executive editor. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife. Gwynne’s latest book is His Majesty’s Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine.

Moderator

Lise Olsen

Lise Olsen is investigative editor at the Texas Observer and author of Code of Silence: Sexual Misconduct by Federal Judges, the Secret System that Protects Them and the Women Who Blew the Whistle (Beacon Press 2021), winner of the Texas Institute of Letters’ Carr P. Collins award and the Investigative Reporters & Editors’ book award. She is working on a new book about the mystery still surrounding one of Houston’s most notorious murder cases, The Scientist and the Serial Killer (Random House 2025).