John Updike: A Celebration with Ian McEwan, Hermione Lee and David Baddiel
Open just about any book by the supreme American writer John Updike, who sadly died on 27 January 2009 at the age of 76, and you will find a variant on the following biographical note: John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He attended Shillington High School, Harvard College and the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art at the University of Oxford, where he spent a year on a Knox Fellowship. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of the New Yorker, to which he has contributed numerous poems, short stories, essays and book reviews. Since 1957 he has lived in Massachusetts as a freelance writer.
As fellow novelist and screenwriter Ian McEwan said at the time, ‘Updike was a modern master, a colossal figure in American letters, the finest writer working in English. He dazzled us with his interests and intellectual curiosity, and he turned a beautiful sentence. Religion, sex, science, urban decay, small-town life, the life of the heart, the betrayals – who can follow him? Updike gave the impression he had a lot more writing to do. We are all the poorer now’.
On Friday 24 April 2009 Ian McEwan joined biographer Hermione Lee and comedian and novelist David Baddiel at the Rothermere American Institute in Oxford for an evening of talks and discussion celebrating John Updike’s incomparable contribution to contemporary culture.
Organised by the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art and Wolfson College, Oxford in collaboration with the Rothermere American Institute.