Jay Parini - 'Writing the Biographical Novel'

A prize-winning novelist, biographer, poet, and critic, Jay Parini's biographical novel about Walter Benjamin, Benjamin’s Crossing, was a New York Times Notable Book in 1997. He has written biographies of John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Gore Vidal, and Robert Frost (which won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize in 2000). His celebrated novel about Tolstoy's final days, The Last Station, was adapted into a film starring Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer, and James McAvoy. In 2020 Parini is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in QMUL's School of English and Drama; he is D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College in Vermont.