The Great Fire: Shirley Hazzard in Conversation with Richard Ford

April 30, 2010 | 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center | NYC

With Richard Ford and Shirley Hazzard

Co-sponsored by 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy. This event was recorded before a live audience at New York’s 92nd Street Y.

LISTEN | Download the mp3

CLIPS: Annabel Davis-Goff | Richard Ford

Two modern-day masters meet to discuss the grand themes—“time, love, the coming around of inexorable events … the acceleration and dislocation of modern life.” What Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard once said about her own subject matter can also be said of Richard Ford’s, especially his epic Bascombe Trilogy (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land). Ford is a great admirer of Hazzard’s work, and will serve as her interviewer for this very special evening. Author of such contemporary classics as The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire, Hazzard is “one of the greatest writers working in English today,” said Michael Cunningham. The evening features readings of Hazzard’s work by friends and admirers, including Annabel Davis-Goff and others.

 PHOTO GALLERY
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PEN BLOGS

• Mindy Aloff: At the 92nd Street YM-YWHA on Friday, the novelist and essayist Shirley Hazzard engaged the novelist Richard Ford in a conversation about reading and writing that was so warm, and literate, and amusing, and inspiring that it provoked something I don’t often encounter at literary events: a standing ovation. [more]