Idra Novey.
You won’t need to be reminded that in 2020 Unbound - like so many other festivals and cultural events - was the victim of the COVID pandemic. We still mourn all the authors who were scheduled to join us that year, and so it’s especially sweet when we manage to bring one of them to Columbia for another year. That’s the case with the brilliant Idra Novey, who is something of a triple threat. She will be joining our panel on translation, will be discussing her extraordinary novel, Take What You Need, and she’ll be reading from her forthcoming poetry collection, Soon and Wholly. We know it will be worth the four-year wait!
Idra Novey is a novelist, poet, and translator. Her most recent novel Take What You Need was named a spring fiction pick with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and one of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2023 So Far. Her first novel Ways to Disappear was a finalist for the L.A. Times First Fiction Prize and won the Brooklyn Public Library's Book Prize for Fiction. Her works as a translator include Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. and a co-translation with Ahmad Nadalizadeh of Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, Lean Against This Late Hour, a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Prize in 2021. She teaches fiction at Princeton University and in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at NYU. Her new book of poems, Soon and Wholly, is forthcoming in 2024.
