Yann Martel: Son of Nobody
The Booker Prize-winning author of Life of Pi discusses his new novel, a masterpiece of myth, history and domesticity, at an event hosted by Shahidha Bari.
The past is never done with: always the song continues.
Harlow Donne has devoted his life to the Classical world. When a chance comes up to study an obscure collection of papyrus fragments at Oxford University, he seizes it, though it means leaving his daughter and fracturing marriage back home in Canada.
Under his gaze – as the sole translator and interpreter of The Psoad – the text unlocks echoes of Ancient Greece into the present day, and a personal message to his beloved child appears.
Despite the 3,000-year gap between the two, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of ambition, love and grief.
Yann Martel is the author of Life of Pi, for which he was awarded the 2002 Man Booker Prize, and three other novels, as well as a short story collection, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios.
Shahidha Bari is an academic and broadcaster. She is a professor at the University of the Arts London and presents Front Row and Free Thinking on BBC Radio 4. She’s the author of Dressed: The Philosophy of Clothes, and Look Again: Fashion (Tate, 2022). She is a Trustee of The Brontë Parsonage and a regular books reviewer for The Guardian and the Financial Times.
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