Geoff Dyer’s books include the novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and many innovative non-fiction books on a wide variety of subjects: But Beautiful (jazz), The Missing of the Somme (The First World War), Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It (travel), Out of Sheer Rage (D. H. Lawrence), The Ongoing Moment (photography), and Zona (Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker). His collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012. His latest book, The Last Days of Roger Federer, is more about Nietzsche, Beethoven and J. M.W. Turner than it is about tennis. In 2003 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship; in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; In 2014 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 2015 he received a Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction and was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. He is currently a Writer in Residence at USC, Los Angeles. His website is geoffdyer.com
Maya Jasanoff is X.D. and Nancy Yang Professor of Arts and Sciences and Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University and resident faculty at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES). She specializes in the history of the British Empire. Her most recent book is The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World.
This event is co-sponsored by the History Seminar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.
About the Series:
Writers Speak, a series of literary conversations at the Mahindra Humanities Center, is convened by Duncan White, Associate Director in the Program in General Education and Lecturer in History & Literature at Harvard University.