John Keene on Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN

Kathryn Scanlan (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction) talks with Prize Director Michael Kelleher about legendary New Yorker journalist Joseph Mitchell's famous double-profile of New York fixture Joe Gould, the perils of running out of ideas, and the blurry line between fiction and reality. Reading list: Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell • "Joe Gould's Teeth" by Jill Lepore • Bright Lights Big City by Jay McInerney • Old Mr. Flood by Joseph Mitchell Kathryn Scanlan is the author of two novels (Aug 9—Fog and Kick the Latch) and one collection of short stories (The Dominant Animal). She won a 2021 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and her work has appeared in Egress, Granta, and NOON, among other places, and her short story “The Old Mill” was selected by Michael Cunningham for the 2010 Iowa Review Fiction Prize. A graduate of the University of Iowa and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she currently lives in Los Angeles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

m. nourbeSe philip (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry) talks with Prize Director Michael Kelleher about Kamau Brathwaite's tremendous collection, Born to Slow Horses, the lineage of Brathwaite's complex and playful work, and her own poetic connections to Brathwaite's writing. Reading list: Born to Slow Horses by Kamau Brathwaite • Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys • The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon • The Tempest by William Shakespeare m. nourbeSe philip is an internationally renowned poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. Across her diverse and rich body of work, philip has constantly and deeply engaged with the complexities of art, colonialism, identity, and race, with a particular interest in forgotten and suppressed histories. Born in Woodlands, Moriah, Trinidad and Tobago in 1947, she is the recipient of many honors, including the Molson Prize (2021), the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature (2020), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1990), philip was educated at the University of the West Indies and earned graduate degrees in law and political science from the University of Western Ontario. Her writing has featured in numerous anthologies, including the Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women in English (2000) and International Feminist Fiction (1992), among others. She lives in Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sonya Kelly (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Drama) joins Michael Kelleher to admire and contemplate Jeremy Leggatt's translation of Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. They discuss film adaptations, writing emotions, keeping audiences happy, and more. Reading list: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, tr. by Jeremy Leggatt • The Hours by Michael Cunningham • Once Upon a Bridge by Sonya Kelly For a full episode transcript, click here.   Sonya Kelly is the author of five full-length plays, as well as numerous scripts for film, radio, and television. Once Upon a Bridge (2021) was a finalist for the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Best New Play Award and Kelly’s work has been recognized with two Scotsman Fringe First Awards (2022, 2012) as well as the Stewart Parker Award (2018), a Writers' Guild of Ireland Award (2019) and the Dublin Fringe Award for Best Production (2014). A graduate of Trinity College, she lives in Dublin with her wife and daughter. Sonya is a member of The Dean Arts Studios, an organization dedicated to supporting artists from all over the world by providing rent-free space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher Chen (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Drama) 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices