The Inaugural Speaker of the 2024 session of the T. S. Eliot International Summer School will be world renowned and award-winning writer, biographer, and scholar Lyndall Gordon, author of The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse (2022) and The Imperfect Life of T.S. Eliot (1999; rev. 2012), as well as of celebrated books on Emily Dickinson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry James, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, and others. A long-time friend and patron of the Summer School and a regular lecturer with us, Gordon is a Senior Research Fellow in English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and the inaugural evening will feature a wide-ranging Question and Answer session featuring her insights into Eliot’s life and work.
Gordon takes a rightful place among an august company of contemporary writers, including Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney (who opened the inaugural programme in 2009) Tom Stoppard, Paul Muldoon, Gabriel Josipovici, Ruth Padel, and others.
