To celebrate one hundred years since Sylvia Beach, publisher and bookseller, published James Joyce’s ULYSSES, Hay Festival is partnering the iconic bookshop Shakespeare and Company, Paris, on a global read-along of the complete text to be released as a free podcast between the 100th anniversary of the publication on 2 February 2022 and Bloomsday on 16 June 2022.
The readers include Stephen Fry, Margaret Atwood, Meena Kandasamy, Will Self, Jeanette Winterson, Olivia Laing, Ben Okri, Ishion Hutchinson, Paul Murray, Deborah Levy, Caoilinn Hughes, Eddie Izzard, Sylvia Whitman, and many more.
“In order to celebrate the centenary of this gargantuan, sprawling, polyphonic and wildly ambitious work of literature it felt only right to attempt something a little bit crazy ourselves. We hope that this diverse celebration of Ulysses, read by some of the most brilliant contemporary writers and performers, and made freely available to listeners around the world, will introduce James Joyce's modernist masterwork to a whole new generation” - Adam Biles, Literary Director of Shakespeare and Company.
Home is the word that hovers over the Odyssey from first to last. Festival President Stephen Fry talks about the centenary of the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses and his own journey towards the finish line as he completes the fourth of his Greek mythology metrology. A sense of home is something very deep inside all of us.
Watch Again“Ulysses is going to make my place famous,” Sylvia Beach wrote to James Joyce when she made the decision to publish his novel, written over seven years and describing the events of a single day in Dublin. To celebrate a hundred years of this literary masterpiece, five devoted readers share their thoughts on reading a novel that has a reputation for being challenging, while maintaining a cult-like following as one of the defining books of modernism. Chloe Aridjis is a writer, Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company in Paris and John Mitchinson is publisher at Unbound. They talk to writer and journalist Sinéad Gleeson.
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