Kate Briggs’s celebrated work spans – and complicates the distinction between – several fields: translation, literary criticism, memoir, and fiction. In this conversation she will explore the range of her practices and her preoccupations with Peter Boxall, one of the pre-eminent commentators on the pasts and futures of the novel. Kate will read brief excerpts from her writings in the course of the discussion, so it will be fully accessible to those who have not yet read her luminous work.

Peter Boxall is the Goldsmiths Professor of English Literature at Oxford and a fellow of New College. He is the author of numerous books including The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life (2020), winner of the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, and most recently The Possibility of Literature (2024) which develops a constellatory theory of literary possibility via essays on authors from Melville and Dickinson to Woolf and Beckett to Zadie Smith and J. M. Coetzee.
Kate Briggs is a writer, editor and translator based in Rotterdam, where she co-runs the publishing project @shortpiecesthatmove. She is the author of This Little Art (a long essay on the practice of translation) and The Long Form (a novel), both published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Her experiments in criticism include: Exercise in Pathetic Criticism (iam, 2011), ‘Story the Story In It’ (Amodern), Reading is an alternation of flights and perchings (No Press, 2013), The Nabokov Paper (iam, 2013) and Entertaining Ideas (Ma Bibliothèque, 2018). She teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute.