Edmund de Waal

in Conversation with

Hermione Lee

The celebrated artist and writer Edmund de Waal will be in a free-flowing conversation with biographer Hermione Lee about his life and work, as well as the intersections of art and memoir-writing. As described on his website:

'In his visual art and literary works, Edmund de Waal uses objects as vehicles for human narrative, emotion and history. His installations of handmade porcelain vessels, often contained in minimalist structures, investigate themes of diaspora, memory and materiality'

This conversation will explore these themes-human narrative, emotion, and history-in depth.

Speaker Details:

Edmund de Waal is an internationally acclaimed artist and writer, best known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels, often created in response to collections and archives or the history of a particular place. His interventions have been made for diverse spaces and museums worldwide, including Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire; the Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris; The British Museum, London; The Frick Collection, New York; Ateneo Veneto, Venice; Schindler House, Los Angeles; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and V&A Museum, London. De Waal is also renowned for his bestselling family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), and The White Road (2015). His most recent book, Letters to Camondo, a series of haunting letters written during lockdown was published in April 2021. He was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction by Yale University in 2015. In 2021 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and awarded a CBE for his services to art. In 2024 he was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. 

b.1964 Nottingham. He lives and works in London.

Hermione Lee , GBE, FRLS, FBA ,  was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 (where she founded OCLW in  2011) and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. Her work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), Penelope Fitzgerald (2013) and Tom Stoppard (2020). She has also written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth and Willa Cather, an OUP Very Short Introduction to Biography, and a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts. She is currently working on a Life of Anita Brookner.