A Celebration of Shirley Hazzard: The Transit of Venus

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff (Vera, Cleopatra, The Witches), novelist Roxana Robinson (Leaving, Cost), and Matthew Specktor (Always Crashing in the Same Car) in a conversation celebrating the legacy of National Book Award-winning novelist Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) and her enduring masterwork, The Transit of Venus. The evening will open with a reading by actress Emily Mortimer.

A dazzling family saga following the entwined fate of two sisters who leave their native Australia for a new life in postwar England, The Transit of Venus has entranced readers since its 1980 publication and left its mark on a generation of younger writers. Written in exquisite prose with “etherizing beauty” (Parul Sehgal, The New York Times), it has been hailed by The Paris Review as “one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century.” Nearly 50 years later, Hazzard’s reflections on the sweep of history and the tragedy of family secrets remain both timeless and contemporary. In celebration of its first ever audiobook recording, which features archival footage of Hazzard herself reading from the novel on The 92nd Street Y’s stage, hear Schiff, Robinson, and others in a celebratory, incantatory reading — followed by an in-depth discussion about a writer who, in Schiff’s words, “achieved perfection on the page.”