Peter Filkins will speak on “Writing History, Writing Biography: Capturing H.G. Adler’s Many Worlds”.
Peter Filkins is the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock where he has taught since 1988 and is currently Chair of the Languages and Literature Department. His first love is writing poetry and of which he has published four volumes. He is the recipient of many awards and fellowships including the 2012 Writer in Residence at the James Merrill House, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the American Academy in Berlin. He is also an acclaimed translator of both poetry and prose and his poems, essays, reviews and translations have appeared in numerous journals, Poetry Magazine, The Yale Review, The Paris Review and many others. He has translated three of H. G. Adler’s novels and now brings us the definitive biography of this remarkable writer, Holocaust survivor and witness to the darkest period of the 20th Century – “H.G. Adler – A Life in Many Worlds”
H.G. Adler has been compared to Kafka and Robert Musil – he was a member of the Prague Circle of Literature headed by Kafka. He is widely acclaimed as a poet, novelist, essayist and historian who devoted his life to being a witness to the Holocaust, to the memory of those who perished (both his wife and mother-in-law died in Auschwitz) and to his times – he was a key contributor to the prosecution in the trial of Adolf Eichmann – “a man committed to helping human dignity survive in the face of systematic oppression, both then and now”.