An Evening with Claire Messud
Claire Messud is the author of six works of fiction. Her first novel, When the World Was Steady (1995), and her book of novellas, The Hunters (2001), were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award; and her second novel, The Last Life, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and Editor’s Choice at The Village Voice. Her novel, The Emperor’s Children (2006), was a New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post Best Book of the Year. All four books were named New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She is also the author of a collection of nonfiction personal essays, Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write
An Autobiography through Essays (2020). Messud has been awarded Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and children. A recipient of a Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.
Professor Leland de la Durantaye is a critic, translator and professor. He taught at the École Normale Supérieure and at Harvard for many years and now lives in Los Angeles, where he is currently Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College. His journalism and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Bookforum, Artforum, The Believer, Cabinet, and others. De la Durantaye is also a translator from the French and Italian; his translation of the Jacques Jouet novel Upstaged (2011) was a finalist for the PEN Best Translated Book of the Year. His nonfiction books are Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (2007), Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (2009), and Beckett’s Art of Mismaking (2016). He has also published a novel, Hannah Versus the Tree (2018).
Messud's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Literature Department and the Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World at CMC.