University of Adelaide: Wax lyrical with award-winning writers
Two award-winning, internationally celebrated writers will visit the University of Adelaide for an intimate lyric poetry reading.
Hoa Nguyen and Nam Le will share recent work at a public reading on Friday 14 October.
“It’s a great privilege to have writers of Hoa Nguyen’s and Nam Le’s calibre and reputation joining us to read from their work, to meet with students and colleagues, and to demonstrate the centrality of poetry to contemporary writing and thought,” says the University of Adelaide’s Professor Patrick Flanery, Chair of Creative Writing, Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film.
“This is a special opportunity for us all to share in the recent work of two internationally celebrated writers who see the present and the past with the kind of clarity and nuance that has the power to transform our sense of the possibilities of literature.”
Hoa Nguyen is a Vietnamese-born American writer, who has more than twenty years’ teaching experience. She is a Visiting Practitioner at Toronto Metropolitan University, and is Co-Chair of the discipline of Writing at Bard College, New York State.
Ms Nguyen is the author of several books and her fifth book of poems, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2021.
Nam Le is a Vietnamese-born Australian writer. His first book, The Boat, received many accolades, including the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award. It was also selected as a New York Times Notable Book, the best debut of 2008 by New York Magazine, and a book of the year by numerous publications including The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, and Amazon.
The Boat has been translated into fourteen languages and its stories are widely anthologised, adapted and taught.
“It’s a great privilege to have writers of Hoa Nguyen’s and Nam Le’s calibre and reputation joining us to read from their work, to meet with students and colleagues, and to demonstrate the centrality of poetry to contemporary writing and thought.”
Professor Patrick Flanery, Chair of Creative Writing, Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film, at the University of Adelaide.
The poetry reading is the public-facing component and conclusion of a day-long academic conference at the University, ‘The Lyric Now’, which explores what the role of lyric poetry might be in a time of unprecedented and multivalent national and global crises, and what it means for poets to work with or against the lyric.
Universities participating in the conference include New York University; Østfold University College, Norway; Massey University (Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa), Victoria University of Wellington (Te Herenga Waka); University of Melbourne; Deakin University; and Australian National University.