Damon Galgut in conversation with James Wood

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Damon Galgut Damon Galgut is a playwright and novelist living in Cape Town. He was born in Pretoria and studied drama at the University of Cape Town, writing his first novel, A Sinless Season (1984), when he was seventeen. Small Circle of Beings (1988), a collection of short stories, was followed by the novels The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991), and The Quarry (1995). The Good Doctor (2003) won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region, Best Book) and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His most recent novels are The Impostor (2008), In a Strange Room (2010), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Arctic Summer (2014), and The Promise (2021), which won the Booker Prize.

James Wood is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard. He has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007. In 2009, he won the National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism. His critical essays are collected in The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays. He is also the author of two novels The Book Against God and Upstate, and a study of technique in the novel, How Fiction Works. His most recent book, Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997-2019, collects the best essays from his career into one definitive volume.

ABOUT THE SERIES
Writers Speak, a series of literary conversations at the Mahindra Humanities Center started by Claire Messud in 2016, is convened by Duncan White, Associate Director of Studies in History & Literature at Harvard University.

Recorded 3/22/2022