Geoff Dyer on Xiaolu Guo's A CONCISE CHINESE-ENGLISH DICTIONARY FOR LOVERS
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.
To kick off our Winter Mini-season for 2026, Geoff Dyer (recipient of a 2015 Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction) joins Prize Director Michael Kelleher for a conversation about Xiaolu Guo’s riotous and moving A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers.
From the episode:
GD: This book, it was just a pleasure from start to finish—it was a pleasure and a source of irritation, even before I started reading it, because actually it was my wife, Rebecca, who was reading it before me. We were in bed and I’d sort of feel “okay, I’m gonna go to sleep now,” and then I’d be drifting off to sleep and I’d be woken up by Rebecca laughing, I mean, just all the time! I could hardly wait for her to get through it so I could join in the fun, too.
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Geoff Dyer is the author, most recently, of Homework: A Memoir as well as four novels and many other non-fiction works. Dyer has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography’s 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ E.M. Forster Award. In 2009 he was named GQ’s Writer of the Year. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012 and was a finalist in 1998. In 2015 he received a Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he is Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California.
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.
Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast features a series of conversations with past and present winners of the Windham-Campbell Prizes about books and plays that they love, hosted by prize director Michael Kelleher. The Windham-Campbell Prizes are administered by Yale University Library’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The podcast is a co-production between The Windham-Campbell Prizes and Literary Hub. Hosted by Michael Kelleher. Production & Engineering by Drew Broussard. Music by Dani Lencioni.
