Heather Clark, whose 1,100-page biography of Sylvia Plath was published by Alfred A. Knopf and Jonathan Cape in October 2020, talks about her experience writing the life of an iconic figure who has been mythologized and pathologized for half a century. Clark spent eight years researching and writing her biography. Her book draws upon a wealth of new material—including key letters, interviews, manuscripts, and psychiatric information—to give a fuller portrait of Plath’s early life, college years, marriage to Ted Hughes, and literary career. Clark will discuss the fraught history of Plath biography, her own decision to write a new life of Plath, and some of the challenges she encountered along the way. She will also talk about the merits of “slow” biography in the age of the soundbite, and why we need more big biographies of women.

Life-Writing Beyond Words is a research network and termly series of public events, hosted by Felix Appelbe, the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, and Ocean Ambassadors, that explores how we move between words and the non-verbal.

Life-writing is the study of lives, through letters, diaries, performance, memoir, autobiography and biography. But it frequently has to negotiate the non-verbal, for instance when describing the creative minds of composers, choreographers or artists, capturing the sound and light of childhood, or eavesdropping on the world of animal experience. How can these worlds be captured in words?

We are addressing this challenge by convening a network that spans many disciplines, bringing together academics, practitioners and performers who would otherwise not meet. Free-thinking lectures and laboratories will forge new pathways between the verbal and the non-verbal, journeying towards innovative experimental and performative methodologies.

This is the second in a termly series exploring the non-verbal in life-writing, with contributions from Martin Bencsik, Katherine Collins, Eleanor Morgan, Olivier Adam and Aline Penitot.

What can life-writing learn from the expressive forms of the animal kingdom? An interdisciplinary panel of artists and scientists convene to ask: what is the sound of a spider web? How do the vibrations of bees spread news? What do humpback whales make of human music, and how might human poetry learn from birdsong?

A series of papers discussing life-writing in the form of the essay, and applying this form to life-writing on the subject of health and sickness. Please click through for further information on the OCLW website.



The event takes the form of 6 pre-recorded videos, all of which will be released online at 1pm. The total duration is just under 2 hours, but they can be watched in any order, and will remain online indefinitely.

Hermione Lee, whose biography of Tom Stoppard is published by Faber on 1 October, talks about his life and work, and the challenges for a biographer in writing the life of a living subject.

With unprecedented access to private papers, diaries, letters, and countless interviews with figures ranging from Felicity Kendal to John Boorman and Trevor Nunn to Steven Spielberg, Hermione Lee has built a meticulously researched portrait of one of our greatest playwrights. Drawing on several years of long, exploratory conversations with Stoppard himself, it tracks his Czech origins and childhood in India to every school and home he’s ever lived in, every piece of writing he’s ever done, and every play and film he’s ever worked on. This is the revealing story of a very public and very private man.

Hermione Lee was the President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017, and is the founder and advisory director of OCLW. She held the Goldsmiths’ Chair of English Literature at Oxford from 1998 to 2008, and before that taught at the Universities of Liverpool and York. Her work includes acclaimed biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2007) and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography). She has also published books on Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather and Philip Roth, and she has written about life-writing, in Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing (2005), Biography: A Very Short Introduction (2009), and, co-edited with Kate Kennedy, in a collection based on an OCLW conference, called Lives of Houses (2020). Her biography of Tom Stoppard is published by Faber in October 2020. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Royal Society of Literature (where she serves on the Council) and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literature.

The video of Hermione's lecture will be available for 24 hours only, from 5.30pm on Tuesday 3rd November 2020. Click here to watch.

This year we celebrate May day with a virtual concert. We will showcase a variety of home-grown Wolfson talent on the College's YouTube channel.