Acclaimed fantasy author Maria Dahvana Headley will deliver this year’s Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature at Pembroke College, Oxford.

The lecture will take place on Tuesday, May 16th in the Pichette Auditorium at 6 PM BST.

Please click here for more information about the event and to reserve your lecture ticket.

A recording of the lecture will also be made available via our YouTube Channel.

About the Speaker

Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times-bestselling, Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning author of eight books, most recently Beowulf: A New Translation (MCD/FSG), which was named as a book of the year by The Atlantic Monthly, National Public Radio, Vox, The Irish Times, The Guardian, The New Statesman, and more. It won the 2021 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the 2021 Hugo award for “Best Related Work”. Her novel, The Mere Wife (MCD/FSG), a contemporary adaptation of Beowulf, was named by The Washington Post as one of the “Notable Works of Fiction in 2018”.

She has written for both teenagers (Magonia and Aerie, Harper Collins) and adults in various genres and forms. Headley’s short fiction has been shortlisted for the Nebula and Shirley Jackson awards and for the 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize and has been anthologised in many year’s bests; a collection is under contract to FSG. Her work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony, Arte Studio Ginestrelle, and the Sundance Institute’s Theatre Lab, among other organisations.

In Summer 2023, she’ll be a fellow at the Hawthornden Foundation’s Casa Ecco in Lake Como, Italy. She currently teaches at Bennington College and Sarah Lawrence College and has delivered masterclasses and lectures at Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, Columbia, UCSD, The University of Iowa, U Penn, Dartmouth, and Northwestern University, among many others. She delivers regular Zoom writing workshops to the public through The Shipman Agency’s workroom.

Her upcoming projects include a ten-episode full-cast musical adaptation of Vergil’s Aeneid for Audible UK, to be released in 2023; a novel from FSG about volcanoes, creation myths and time travel; a spy thriller; and a nonfiction book about the history of storytelling.

She grew up in the high desert of Idaho on a survivalist sled dog ranch, where she spent summers plucking the winter coat from her father’s wolf.

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Maria Dahvana Headley’s photo is credited to Beowulf Sheehan.