Episodes

  • Jen Hadfield on Annie Dillard's PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

    Jen Hadfield on Annie Dillard's PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK
    Jul 24 2024
    Jen Hadfield (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry) joins Michael Kelleher to wade through Annie Dillard's dense yet rewarding classic, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. They discuss difficult reading experiences, poetic attempts to unlock the ineffable and immense, the book's intense relationship to the natural world and how that has impacted Hadfield's own work, and more. Reading list: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard • Walden by Henry David Thoreau • Storm Pegs by Jen Hadfield • "An Transparent Eyeball" by Ralph Waldo Emerson For a full episode transcript, click here. Jen Hadfield is a poet, bookmaker, and visual artist. She is the author of four poetry collections, including most recently The Stone Age. Her second collection, Nigh-No-Place (2008) received the T. S. Eliot Prize. Hadfield earned her BA from the University of Edinburgh and MLitt in creative writing from the University of Strathclyde and the University of Glasgow. Her awards and honors include a Highland Books Prize (2022), an Edwin Morgan International Poetry Award (2012), the Dewar Award (2007) and an Eric Gregory Award (2003), as well as residencies with the Shetland Arts Trust and the Scottish Poetry Library. In 2014, she was named by the Poetry Book Society as one of twenty poets selected to represent the Next Generation of poets in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Hadfield currently lives in the Shetland Islands, where she is Reader in Residence at Shetland Library.
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    32 mins
  • Christina Sharpe on John Keene's COUNTERNARRATIVES

    Christina Sharpe on John Keene's COUNTERNARRATIVES
    Jul 10 2024
    Christina Sharpe (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction) joins Michael Kelleher to rave about 2018 Fiction prize-winner John Keene's Counternarratives. They discuss the pleasures of Keene's playful prose and his deep engagement with stirring questions of truth and history. Reading list: Counternarratives by John Keene • Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain • James by Percival Everett • Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison • The Awakening by Kate Chopin For a full episode transcript, click here. Christina Sharpe is the Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto, Canada, as well as the author of three books of nonfiction: Ordinary Notes (2023), In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010). Sharpe’s writing has also appeared in many artist catalogues and journals. Ordinary Notes was a Finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction. The winner of the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, Sharpe lives in Toronto.
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    36 mins
  • Christopher Chen on Jorge Luis Borges's "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"

    Christopher Chen on Jorge Luis Borges's "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
    Jun 26 2024
    Christopher Chen (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Playwriting) joins Michael Kelleher to talk about the eternally fascinating Jorge Luis Borges story, ""Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Timelines slip, worlds collide, and Borges's lasting impact is felt. Reading list: "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges • Italo Calvino • Rosicrucianism • Caught by Christopher Chen • Borges, Between History and Eternity by Hernán Díaz For a full episode transcript, click here. Christopher Chen is the author of more than a dozen formally innovative and politically provocative plays, including, most recently, The Headlands (2020) and Passage (2019). The recipient of a United States Artists USA Fellowship (2021), a Steinberg Playwright Award (2020), and an Obie Award for Playwriting (2017), among many other honors, Chen holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in playwriting from San Francisco State University. He lives in California. The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
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    30 mins
  • Deirdre Madden on Marilynne Robinson's HOUSEKEEPING

    Deirdre Madden on Marilynne Robinson's HOUSEKEEPING
    Jun 12 2024
    Deirdre Madden (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction) joins Michael Kelleher to talk about Marilynne Robinson's classic novel Housekeeping, siblings, writing with a density of language, and the unacknowledged humor present even in hard times. Reading list: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson • Moby-Dick by Herman Melville • Carl Jung • William Shakespeare • Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson For a full episode transcript, click here. Deirdre Madden is a writer from Toomebridge, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. The author of eight acclaimed novels, she has twice been a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2009, 1996) and has received numerous other awards and honors, including the Hennessy Literary Awards Hall of Fame (2014), the Somerset Maugham Award (1989), and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature (1980). Madden holds a BA from Trinity College, Dublin and an MA from the University of East Anglia. She has been a member of Aosdána, the affiliation of creative artists in Ireland, since 1997, and is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Co-Director of the M.Phil in Creative Writing at Trinity College, Dublin. The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
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    35 mins
  • Hanif Abdurraqib on Gloria Naylor's THE WOMEN OF BREWSTER PLACE

    Hanif Abdurraqib on Gloria Naylor's THE WOMEN OF BREWSTER PLACE
    May 29 2024
    Hanif Abdurraqib (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction) joins Michael Kelleher to discuss his love for Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, writing about cities, the importance of community, and more. Reading list: The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor • Mama Day by Gloria Naylor • Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor • Your Blues Ain't Like Mine by Bebe Moore Campbell • The Easy Rawlins novels by Walter Mosley • Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan For a full episode transcript, click here. Hanif Abdurraqib is the author of three critically acclaimed books of nonfiction and five poetry collections. A writer of extraordinary depth, style, and range, Abdurraqib is a public intellectual in the truest sense of the term, combining discursive flexibility with a profound emotional and intellectual rigor. In both his essays and in books like A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance (2021), Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest (2019), and They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (2017), Abdurraqib moves through a wide range of subjects—Michael Jackson and moon walks, Sun Ra and NASA missions—incorporating the personal and the political with both joy and seeming effortlessness. He is the recipient of an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction (2022), the Gordon Burn Prize (2021), and a MacArthur Fellowship (2021) among other honors. Abdurraqib is also the host of a weekly podcast called “Object of Sound” with Sonos Radio. The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
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    36 mins
  • Tessa Hadley on Ivan Turgenev's FIRST LOVE

    Tessa Hadley on Ivan Turgenev's FIRST LOVE
    Feb 28 2024
    Tessa Hadley (winner of a 2016 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction) joins Michael Kelleher for the final episode of this winter mini-season to talk about Ivan Turgenev's First Love, translated by Isaiah Berlin. Reading list: First Love by Ivan Turgenev, tr. by Isaiah Berlin • The Odyssey by Homer • "A Nest of Gentlefolk" by Ivan Turgenev • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Tessa Hadley is the author of three previous collections of stories and eight novels. She was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, the Hawthornden Prize, and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and has been a finalist for the Story Prize. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and reviews for The Guardian and the London Review of Books. She lives in Cardiff, Wales. The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
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    32 mins
  • John Keene on Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN

    John Keene on Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN
    Feb 21 2024
    John Keene (winner of a 2018 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction) talks with Prize Director Michael Kelleher about Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's 2021 Prix Goncourt-winning novel The Most Secret Memory of Men, the joys of a shaggy dog story, the power of the sublime, and the limits of knowledge. Reading list: The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, tr. by Laura Vergnaud • Blackouts by Justin Torres • Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem • Roberto Bolaño • Clarice Lispector John Keene is a writer, translator, professor, and artist who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018. His latest book, Punks: New and Selected Poems, won the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry. In 1989, Keene joined the Dark Room Writers Collective, and is a Graduate Fellow of the Cave Canem Writers Workshops. He is the author of Annotations, and Counternarratives, both published by New Directions, as well as several other works, including the poetry collection Seismosis, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer. Keene is the recipient of many awards and fellowships—including the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Whiting Foundation Prize, the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and the American Book Award. He teaches at Rutgers University-Newark.
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    32 mins
  • Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on Caryl Churchill's FAR AWAY

    Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on Caryl Churchill's FAR AWAY
    Feb 14 2024
    Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (winner of a 2016 Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama) chats with Prize Director Michael Kelleher about British theater legend Caryl Churchill's Far Away, the power of language on the page and stage, and the point of having a playwright at all. Reading list: Far Away by Caryl Churchill • Escaped Alone by Caryl Churchill • Top Girls by Caryl Churchill • Prince • Jasmine Lee Jones on Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun • Cristina and Her Double: Essays by Herta Müller Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a playwright whose plays include Girls, Everybody (Pulitzer Prize finalist), War, Gloria (Pulitzer Prize finalist), Appropriate (OBIE Award), An Octoroon (OBIE Award), and Neighbors. A Residency Five playwright at Signature Theatre, recent honors include the Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright from the London Evening Standard, a London Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwriting, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama, the Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Steinberg Playwriting Award, and the inaugural Tennessee Williams Award. Jacobs-Jenkins has taught at Yale, NYU, Juilliard, Hunter College, and the University of Texas-Austin. The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
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    32 mins