32 min

John Keene on Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast

    • Books

John Keene (winner of a 2018 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction) talks with Prize Director Michael Kelleher about Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's 2021 Prix Goncourt-winning novel The Most Secret Memory of Men, the joys of a shaggy dog story, the power of the sublime, and the limits of knowledge.
Reading list: 
The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, tr. by Laura Vergnaud • Blackouts by Justin Torres • Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem • Roberto Bolaño • Clarice Lispector

John Keene is a writer, translator, professor, and artist who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018. His latest book, Punks: New and Selected Poems, won the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry. In 1989, Keene joined the Dark Room Writers Collective, and is a Graduate Fellow of the Cave Canem Writers Workshops. He is the author of Annotations, and Counternarratives, both published by New Directions, as well as several other works, including the poetry collection Seismosis, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer. Keene is the recipient of many awards and fellowships—including the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Whiting Foundation Prize, the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and the American Book Award. He teaches at Rutgers University-Newark.

John Keene (winner of a 2018 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction) talks with Prize Director Michael Kelleher about Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's 2021 Prix Goncourt-winning novel The Most Secret Memory of Men, the joys of a shaggy dog story, the power of the sublime, and the limits of knowledge.
Reading list: 
The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, tr. by Laura Vergnaud • Blackouts by Justin Torres • Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem • Roberto Bolaño • Clarice Lispector

John Keene is a writer, translator, professor, and artist who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018. His latest book, Punks: New and Selected Poems, won the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry. In 1989, Keene joined the Dark Room Writers Collective, and is a Graduate Fellow of the Cave Canem Writers Workshops. He is the author of Annotations, and Counternarratives, both published by New Directions, as well as several other works, including the poetry collection Seismosis, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer. Keene is the recipient of many awards and fellowships—including the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Whiting Foundation Prize, the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and the American Book Award. He teaches at Rutgers University-Newark.

32 min