Acclaimed novelist, playwright, and poet Deborah Levy will speak at the Library on her distinctive style and extensive career. Celebrated for her turbulent, dream-infused prose and philosophical agility, Levy is a master of language and a cataloguer of its failures, exploring the limits of what can be articulated. Her ‘living autobiographies’, a trilogy fusing memoir with theoretical musings, serve as dispatches from liminal spaces. Levy slips through time and sifts through memory. She conjures the life of a woman and artist seeking to understand womanhood and the practice of art. Join her as she details her experience writing in the “storm of life.”

About the speaker:

Deborah Levy is the author of acclaimed novels, short stories and plays. She has written for the Royal Shakespeare Company and dramatized Freud’s two most iconic case histories for the BBC, Dora and The Wolf Man. Her novels Swimming Home (2011) and Hot Milk (2016) were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Man Who Saw Everything (2019) was long listed for the Booker. The Cost of Living and Things I Don’t Want to Know, translated by Celine Leroy in France, won the Prix Femina Etranger 2020. Real Estate, the final volume of her ‘living autobiography’ trilogy, was awarded The Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, 2022. Her new novel, August Blue, will be published by FSG in the US, Hamish Hamilton in the UK. Levy is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature and is currently writing a book about Gertrude Stein, titled MAMA OF DADA.

Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (Levy will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.

This event requires advance registration.