Dionne Brand on José Saramago’s Seeing
In Conversation with Michael Kelleher for the Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast features a series of conversations with past and present Windham-Campbell Prize winners about their favorite books and plays. Hosted by Michael Kelleher.
Mike chats with Dionne Brand, winner of a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction, about the timely power of José Saramago’s Seeing.
For a full episode transcript, click here.
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READING LIST:
Seeing by José Saramago, tr. Margaret Jull Costa • Blindness by José Saramago, tr. Margaret Jull Costa • Saramago’s Nobel Lecture
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From the episode:
Dionne Brand: Well, because, I mean, Saramago’s talking about our time. We recognize these figures.
He’s a really good listener actually, and he is not doing parody necessarily. It is so close to what we’ve been subjected to for the last 25, 30 years or so of speechwriters and speechmaking, and insincerity—increased insincerity—of people who kind of tailor their language, so that they say nothing to us or say some of what we want, but then end up telling us we can’t.
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Dionne Brand is the award-winning author of twenty-three books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Her twelve books of poetry include Land to Light On; thirsty; Inventory; Ossuaries; The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos; and Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems. Her six works of fiction include At the Full and Change of the Moon; What We All Long For; Love Enough; and Theory. Her nonfiction work includes Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Brand is the recipient of numerous literary prizes, among them the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Toronto Book Award, the Trillium Book Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize, and the 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. She is the Editorial Director of Alchemy, an imprint of Knopf Canada, and University Professor Emerita at the University of Guelph. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
