Uploaded March 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
A conversation with Brian Dillon at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 29/02/2024 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
Have you ever read a single sentence that sticks with you, or seen a piece of art that lingers in the back of your mind years later? How do our encounters with literature and art become parts of us–features of our personal and collective cultural consciousness?
Writer, critic, and art-lover Brian Dillon revels in the pleasures of the word. In his quest to understand and experiment with these pleasures, Dillon has published four books with Fitzcarraldo Editions. Essayism, a consideration of the craft of the essay, demands that we consider “a type of writing so hard to define its very name means a trial.” Suppose a Sentence collects essays inspired by single, striking sentences in literary history. Affinities asks why things are drawn together, and we drawn to things. Refusing the position of the critic as distanced from the creative process, Dillon insists upon the simple joy of reading, looking, learning, and making. Personal, poetic, and reflective, each book is a new try at writing. Join Dillon in celebrating major and minor moments in art and literature, marveling at the mechanics of prose and the lessons we can glean from it.
About the Speaker:
Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include Suppose a Sentence, Essayism, The Great Explosion (shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize), Objects in This Mirror: Essays, I Am Sitting in a Room, Sanctuary, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize) and In the Dark Room, which won the Irish Book Award for non-fiction. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, London Review of Books, the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, frieze and Artforum. He has curated exhibitions for Tate and Hayward galleries. He lives in London.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
A conversation with Brian Dillon at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 29/02/2024 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
Have you ever read a single sentence that sticks with you, or seen a piece of art that lingers in the back of your mind years later? How do our encounters with literature and art become parts of us–features of our personal and collective cultural consciousness?
Writer, critic, and art-lover Brian Dillon revels in the pleasures of the word. In his quest to understand and experiment with these pleasures, Dillon has published four books with Fitzcarraldo Editions. Essayism, a consideration of the craft of the essay, demands that we consider “a type of writing so hard to define its very name means a trial.” Suppose a Sentence collects essays inspired by single, striking sentences in literary history. Affinities asks why things are drawn together, and we drawn to things. Refusing the position of the critic as distanced from the creative process, Dillon insists upon the simple joy of reading, looking, learning, and making. Personal, poetic, and reflective, each book is a new try at writing. Join Dillon in celebrating major and minor moments in art and literature, marveling at the mechanics of prose and the lessons we can glean from it.
About the Speaker:
Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include Suppose a Sentence, Essayism, The Great Explosion (shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize), Objects in This Mirror: Essays, I Am Sitting in a Room, Sanctuary, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize) and In the Dark Room, which won the Irish Book Award for non-fiction. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, London Review of Books, the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, frieze and Artforum. He has curated exhibitions for Tate and Hayward galleries. He lives in London.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
