Lorna Sage Memorial Lecture 2023

Dame Hermione Lee: Giving Oneself Away: Biographical Experiences

Dragon Hall - 5:30pm

The School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing is delighted to announce that this year’s Annual Lorna Sage Memorial Lecture will be delivered by biographer and critic, Professor Dame Hermione Lee.

This lecture will brood on the place and force of the personal in biographical writing, drawing on Lorna Sage's example, Lee’s experience of writing biography and her responses to the autobiographical strain in biography.  Why, when and to what end should the biographer say "I"?

Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. She is a biographer and critic whose work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006) and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013), and Tom Stoppard (2020). She has also written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth and Willa Cather, an OUP Very Short Introduction to Biography, and a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts. She was awarded the Biographers’ Club Prize for Exceptional Contribution to Biography in 2018. From 1998 to 2008 she was the Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at Oxford. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2003 she was made a CBE and in 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literary scholarship.

Photo Credit: Tom Pilston