Author Description

Compiling more than fifty years of the best poetic insights from the renowned series, a selection of the E.J. Pratt Lectures are collected together for the first time in this commemorative edition. For more than fifty years, Memorial University's E. J. Pratt Lecture Series has invited eminent critics and artists to St. John's, Newfoundland, to speak on the topics that lie at the heart of their work. This special edition, published to coincide with Memorial's 100th anniversary, gathers a selection of the Lectures, beginning with the one that inaugurated the series in 1968, Northrop Frye's "Silence in the Sea." George Elliott Clarke, Stan Dragland, Seamus Heaney, and Ursula K. Le Guin are among the E. J. Pratt Laureates represented in the volume, which culminates with Madeleine Thien's 2025 Lecture. An album reflecting a changing discipline, the volume is filled with a half-century of luminous writing and trenchant insights into poetry and poetics.