Randy Boyagoda "Why'd you put the book down, Francesca? Life and Death, Reading and Dante"

In this talk, novelist and professor Randy Boyagoda (University of Toronto) will make a case for why, who, and what we read can be life or death decisions. He will do so by exploring signal moments in Dante’s Divine Comedy with life and death stakes based on the decisions individuals make about who and what they read, how, and why. In turn, having read a canto a day of the Divine Comedy for the past five years while writing a Dante-inspired novel, he will read from Dante’s Indiana (Biblioasis), about ordinary people whose lives have been radically changed by the books they took up at high and low points in their lives.

 

Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where has also serves as Vice-Dean, Undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He is the author of six books, including four novels, most recently Dante’s Indiana (2021). He writes essays and reviews for the New York Times, the Atlantic, First Things, and the Financial Times (UK). He lives in Toronto with his wife and four daughters.