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WRITERS SPEAK
SPEAKER: Alice Oswald
"With Homer" – a conversation and reading with Teju Cole
Alice Oswald was trained as a classicist at New College, University of Oxford. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), received a Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. Oswald often works in book-length projects and is known for her interests in gardening, ecology, and music. Her second book, Dart (2002), was the outcome of years of primary and secondary research into the history, environment, and community along the River Dart in Devon, England. Oswald’s other collections of poetry include Woods, etc. (2005), winner of a Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Weeds and Wild Flowers (2009), illustrated by Jessica Greenman; A Sleepwalk on the Severn (2009); Memorial (2011), a reworking of Homer’s Iliad that has received high critical praise for its innovative approach and stunning imagery, which won the 2013 Warwick Prize for writing; and Falling Awake (2016). Her latest book is Nobody (2019), a collage of water-stories, taken mostly from the Odyssey, about a minor character, abandoned on a stony island. Oswald’s many honors and awards include an Eric Gregory Award, an Arts Foundation Award for Poetry, a Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, and a Ted Hughes Awards.
Teju Cole is a novelist, photographer, critic, curator, and the author of five books. He was the photography critic of the New York Times Magazine from 2015 until 2019. He is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard.
About the Series
Writers Speak, a series of literary conversations at the Mahindra Humanities Center, is convened by Claire Messud, a novelist and Joseph Y. Bae and Janice Lee Senior Lecturer on Fiction at Harvard University.
All MHC event times are in EST.