The Mahindra Humanities Center and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES), welcome Geoff Dyer for a conversation with CES Resident Faculty Maya Jasanoff as part of the Writers Speak lecture series.

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 University of Southern California.

The conversation will be led by Maya Jasanoff, X.D. and Nancy Yang Professor of Arts and Sciences and Coolidge Professor of History and resident faculty at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) at Harvard University. She specializes in the history of the British Empire. Jasanoff served as chair of the 2021 Booker Prize’s judging committee. Her most recent book is The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World

Photo Credit: Matt Stuart