The Shakespeare and Company Interview

Tracy K. Smith comes to Shakespeare and Company for a conversation with Adam Biles. They discuss her book Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times, a bold manifesto on poetry as a tool for deeper living, clearer thinking, and more compassionate citizenship. Drawing on her time as US Poet Laureate, Smith reflects on taking poetry to rural America, and how poems, unlike political debate, can open rather than entrench. She talks about the origins of Fear Less, and why she chose to write a love letter to the art form rather than a polemic. Smith also reads from her forthcoming collection The Forest, sharing new poems on war, complicity, the divine feminine, and an expansive, unsettling "us" that includes those we revile.

Buy Fear Less: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/fear-less-4

Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. From 1997 to 1999 she held a Stegner fellowship at Stanford University. Smith is the author of four books of poetry: The Body's Question (2003), which won the Cave Canem prize for the best first book by an African-American poet; Duende (2007), winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essense Literary Award; Life on Mars (2011), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Wade in the Water (2018). In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. She has also written a memoir, Ordinary Light (2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. Her latest book is Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times (2025).

In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. She teaches at Harvard University, where she is a professor of English and of African and African American Studies and the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
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In the debut episode of Editions, a podcast from Shakespeare and Company and Faber, literary director Adam Biles and Faber Editions curator Ella Griffiths are joined by novelist and performer Taìno Mendez to discuss Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes by Henry Van Dyke, the twentieth title in the Faber Editions imprint.

Published in 1965 and long out of print, the novel follows Oliver, a Black teenager spending a final summer before college in the eccentric Michigan household of his wealthy patron Etta Klein and his aunt Harriet. Witty, camp, and shot through with tragedy, it defies easy categorisation; a drawing-room satire, a coming-of-age story, and a quietly radical work of civil rights era fiction.

The conversation covers the novel's Wildean wit, its oblique engagement with race and queerness, the role of photographer Carl Van Vechten in the Harlem Renaissance, and what it means to write against expectation.

Buy Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes
UK: https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571391783-ladies-of-the-rachmaninoff-eyes-faber-editions/
Rest of World: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/ladies-of-the-rachmaninoff-eyes-faber-editions

Buy Rainbow Milk: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/rainbow-milk

Sign up to Faber’s Heritage Subscription, featuring all Faber Editions titles: Subscribers get a book in the post each month for just £9 alongside a curated email with exclusive extra content about the book and its author.
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Books & Authors Discussed

The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze — William Saroyan (foreword by Stephen Fry)
Mrs Caliban — Rachel Ingalls
Palace of the Peacock — Wilson Harris
Omeros — Derek Walcott
The Flower Beneath the Foot — Ronald Firbank
Sorrow in Sunlight (retitled Prancing N-) — Ronald Firbank
Go Tell It on the Mountain — James Baldwin
Giovanni's Room — James Baldwin
Another Country — James Baldwin
À rebours (Against Nature) — Joris-Karl Huysmans
En rade (Stranded) — Joris-Karl Huysmans
Checkout 19 — Claire-Louise Bennett
Rainbow Milk — Taìno Mendez
Ulysses — James Joyce
Works by Ivy Compton-Burnett, Brigid Brophy and Iris Murdoch also mentioned
Illusions— Ruth Lehmann (upcoming Faber Editions title, discussed with Megan Nolan on our next podcast episode)

Films/TV Shows Discussed

Get Out — dir. Jordan Peele
Lovers Rock — dir. Steve McQueen
The Defiant Ones — starring Sidney Poitier
Playtime — dir. Jacques Tati
Severance

Bios

Taíno Mendez is a novelist based in the southern English town of Margate. Their first novel, Rainbow Milk, was an Observer Top Ten Best Debuts choice for 2020 and widely named as one of the best novels of the year, being shortlisted for a British Book Award and for the Jhalak Prize, Polari Prize and Gordon Burn Prize. Their non-fiction has been published in a variety of outlets including the WritersMosaic, the London Review of Books, Esquire, the Guardian and British Vogue. They are currently working on their second novel.

Ella Griffiths is Faber's Head of Classics & Heritage

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company

Listen to Alex Freiman
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3dbKbpFyqPbklwEdeLYYZR?si=Q5vy9KkRTrqf1BqU1v33cg
Insta : @alex.guitarfreiman

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Philosopher and author Lea Ypi joins Adam Biles at Shakespeare and Company Paris to discuss her latest book Indignity: A Life Reimagined, an extraordinary work blending biography, history, and fiction. When a photo of her grandparents' 1941 honeymoon went viral in Albania, sparking online abuse, Ypi found herself compelled to investigate her grandmother Leman's life in full. The search took her into the Albanian Secret Service archives, back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and deep into questions of memory, belonging, and what it means to preserve dignity in a world that conspires against it. Ypi discusses the dual narrative voices of the book, the "silence of the archives," the ethics of fictionalising real lives, and how writing as a novelist rather than a philosopher transformed her understanding of her subject. A conversation about history, imagination, and the moral necessity of hope.

Buy Indignity: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/indignity-2

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Lea Ypi holds the Ralph Miliband Chair in Politics and Philosophy at the London School of Economics. Her first trade book, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History won the Ondaatje Prize and the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Costa Biography Award. It is translated into over thirty languages.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
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An edited version of this conversation is now available as part of our collaboration with The Yale Review. Read it here: https://yalereview.org/article/shakespeare-and-company-interview-arundhati-roy

Recorded live at Shakespeare and Company, Paris, Adam Biles sits down with Arundhati Roy to discuss her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. Roy reflects on writing a “novelist’s memoir,” where memory and imagination blur, and explores her complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy. The conversation moves from Roy’s unconventional childhood in Kerala to her formative years in architecture, activism, and the aftermath of The God of Small Things. She discusses resisting literary celebrity, embracing political responsibility, and finding strength in chosen families and friendship networks. With candour and wit, Roy rejects reductive “therapy narratives,” instead offering a portrait of identity shaped by contradiction, resilience, and love.

Buy Mother Mary Comes to Me: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/mother-mary-comes-to-me

Arundhati Roy is the author of the novels The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017. She is the author of various works of non-fiction including My Seditious Heart, Azadi and The Architecture of Modern Empire.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company, Paris
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Recorded live at Shakespeare and Company, Adam Biles speaks with Ben Lerner about his novel Transcription, a formally inventive meditation on technology, memory, and human connection.

Beginning with the novel’s deceptively simple premise (a writer loses his recording device and reconstructs an interview from memory) the conversation expands into questions of mediation, voice, and authenticity. Lerner explores how devices reshape attention and relationships, suggesting that humans themselves function as “media,” transmitting voices across time and between generations.

The discussion moves between the philosophical and the intimate: from the limits of digital communication to the emotional power of disembodied voices, from intergenerational care to the fragile transmission of experience. Ultimately, Transcription emerges as a reflection on how stories, memories, and voices persist—less as fixed recordings than as living, shifting acts of interpretation.

Buy Transcription: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/transcription-4

Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, and is the author of three other internationally acclaimed novels, Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04 and The Topeka School. He has published the poetry collections The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award), Mean Free Path and No Art as well as the essay The Hatred of Poetry. Lerner lives and teaches in Brooklyn.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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