Prize Ceremony and Keynote Lecture by Lydia Davis

• Wednesday, September 18
• 5:00 PM
• Yale University Art Gallery, Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Lecture Hall
• 1111 Chapel Street (enter at 201 York Street)
• MAP
• FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Yale University President Maurie D. McInnis presents the 2024 awards in drama, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and internationally acclaimed writer and translator Lydia Davis delivers the annual Windham-Campbell Lecture "Why I Write.”

Davis will be introduced by Associate Professor of Comparative Literature Robyn Creswell.

The lecture will also be livestreamed on the Windham-Campbell YouTube channel.

Lydia Davis is an award-winning writer and translator. Her recent publications include the story collection Our Strangers (2023), Essays Two (2021), a translation from the Dutch of the very short stories by A. L. Snijders entitled Night Train (2021), Essays One (2019), a translation of Marcel Proust's Letters to His Neighbor (2017), a translation of Michel Leiris's The Rules of the Game, Volume 3: Fibrils (2017), the story collection Can't and Won't (2014), and the poetry adaptation “Our Village” in Two American Scenes (with Eliot Weinberger; 2013). She is the translator of numerous other works from the French, including Proust's Swann's Way (Viking Penguin, 2003) and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (2010), both of which were awarded the French-American Foundation's Annual Translation Prize. Among other honors, Davis was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2003, in 2013 received both the Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Man Booker International Prize for her fiction, and has been named both a Chevalier and an Officier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and translation. Her 2009 The Collected Stories was recently included as one of the 100 Best Books of the 21^st Century by The New York Times. She lives in a small village in upstate New York with her husband, the painter Alan Cote.

Robyn Creswell is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and the former poetry editor of The Paris Review. His research focuses on poetic modernisms in English, French, and Arabic. Other fields of interest include the intellectual history of the modern Middle East, theories and practices of translation, and contemporary poetry.

Creswell is the translator of Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Clash of Images (2010) and The Tongue of Adam (2016), as well as Sonallah Ibrahim’s That Smell and Notes from Prison (2013). His essays and reviews have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review. He is a former fellow of the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, and the American Academy in Berlin.