How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world?
2024 Ellmann Lectures: Writing Lives
The 2024 Richard Ellmann Lectures were held in honor of the 10th anniversary of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney’s death. Chosen by Ellmann himself, Seamus Heaney gave the inaugural lectures at Emory in 1988. Ellmann Lectures speakers, Natasha Trethewey and Fintan O’Toole, both have a personal connection to Heaney and lectured on the theme of “Writing Lives,” considering the relationship between art, life, and writing in various forms and contexts.
The 2024 Ellmann Lectures commenced with "The House of Being: Why I Write" delievered by speaker Natasha Trethewey. In this lecture, Natasha Trethewey traced the origins of her writing life through the inherited geography of her childhood and her need to create new metaphors to inhabit. She examined writing as a process of reclamation: of our own lives and the stories of the vanished, forgotten, and erased.
The Ellmann Lectures continued with "Crediting Marvels: Experience, Imagination and the Biographer's Dilemma" from speaker Fintan O'Toole. In this lecture, Fintan O'Toole, who is working on the official biography of Seamus Heaney, reflected on the challenges of mapping the relationship between a writer's experiences on the one hand and the transmutations of life into imagery on the other. How can a biography reveal the roots of art in personal and public history without reducing it to the circumstances of its creation? How can it avoid, as Hamlet has it, plucking out the heart of the artistic mystery?
The 2024 Ellmann Lectures concluded with a Creativity Conversation with Natasha Trethewey and Fintan O'Toole, moderated by Geraldine Higgins.
Media Gallery
Creativity Conversation: Natasha Tretheway & Fintan O'Toole
About the Speakers
Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, Monument (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall (2012); Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Other works include Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); and Domestic Work (2000), which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet. Domestic Work also received the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.
In addition to her poetry, Trethewey is the author of two memoirs The House of Being (2024) and Memorial Drive (2020). Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, appeared in 2010.
She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. At Northwestern University, she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. In 2012 she was named Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi and in 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory for several years, and also served as director of Emory’s Creative Writing Program.
Fintan O’Toole is a columnist with The Irish Times and advising editor of the New York Review of Books. He is the winner of both the Orwell Prize and the European Press Prize. The author of more than 25 books, he is currently working on the official biography of Seamus Heaney.
Born in Dublin in 1958, he is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and an honorary international member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For several years he was the Leonard L. Milberg '53 Visiting Professor in Irish Letters at Princeton University. His most recent book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958, was named 2021 Book of the Year by the Irish Book Awards and as one of the ten best books of 2022 by the New York Times.