Description of the World shortlisted for Pat Lowther Award

PAT LOWTHER MEMORIAL AWARD 2017 SHORTLIST

100 Days by Juliane Okot Bitek (University of Alberta Press) | Float by Anne Carson (Knopf) | Lady Crawford by Julie Cameron Gray (Palimpsest Press) | Let the Empire Down by Alexandra Oliver (Biblioasis) | Heaven’s Thieves by Sue Sinclair (Brick Books) | The Description of the World by Johanna Skibsrud (Wolsak & Wynn)

"Two Sides For Wallace Stevens"

John Melillo and I analyze a distorted recording of Wallace Stevens's "Ordinary Evening in New Haven" for Harvard University's Woodberry Poetry Room blog.http://woodberrypoetryroom.com/?p=2268

On the influence of James Agee

This episode of Jason Boog's Sad Men Podcast explores LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, a Depression-era book by the great James Agee. In it, Giller Prize-winning author Johanna Skibsrud explains how Agee's work influenced her novel, QUARTET FOR THE END OF TIME.

Sound Fiction on Arizona Spotlight, NPR

Music and books are usually parallel styles of expression, not often combined. Author Johanna Skibsrud knew that challenges awaited when she decided to use French composer Olivier Messiean's Quartet for the End of Time as the basis for a novel. 

The original music was written on scraps of paper in 1941, while Messiaen was being held in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Its debut performance was held in the camp's yard, in the rain, for an assembly of prisoners and guards. 

Skibsrud embraced the music's tragic origins, but decided there was another story she wanted to tell...

Washington Post review of Quartet for the End of Time, December 19, 2014

It is "exhilarating to join a novelist working at these bracing heights, where no abstraction — not God, not time, not death, not art, not the meaning of life — is out of bounds, yet where all philosophical searching is rooted in human experience, whether sickening or sublime, and rendered with clarity and sympathy."