The Sebald Lecture 2022: Lydia Davis
Channel: British Library
Date: 2022-06-10

This year’s Sebald Lecture on literary translation will be given by prize-winning short story writer, novelist and translator Lydia Davis, who will be reflecting back over her distinguished career as a translator from French, and discussing her recent collection Essays Two, about translation and foreign language-learning.

The Sebald Lecture 2022 is presented by the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT), in association with the National Centre for Writing and the British Library.

Lydia Davis is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages. In 1999 she was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of writers such as Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris and Pierre-Jean Jouve.

Her versions of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (2003) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (2010) were published to great critical acclaim, and in 2013 she was awarded the Man Booker International Prize. She is the author of a novel, The End of the Story (1995), and several volumes of stories, including Varieties of Disturbance, a National Book Award finalist, and Can’t and Won’t, a New York Times bestseller. In 2009 her stories were brought together in one volume, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis; more recently, her non-fiction has been published in two collections, Essays One (2019) and Essays Two (2021). Lydia Davis is professor emerita at SUNY Albany.

The Sebald Lecture is given annually on an aspect of literature in translation and is named after W.G. Sebald who set up BCLT in 1989. ‘Max’ was a German writer who opted to live in the UK and continue writing in German. His novels and essays include The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz and On the Natural History of Destruction, and they established him as a leading writer of the 20th century.

Image of Lydia Davis © Theo Cote