Mar 05, 2025
St. Bonaventure University will welcome environmental writer and translator Laura Marris to campus for a reading from her newest book, “The Age of Loneliness,” on Thursday, March 13, at 6 p.m. in the Athletics Hall of Fame Room.
The program is free and open to the campus and Olean-area communities.
Marris’ writing has appeared in The Believer, The Yale Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Common, The TLS, The New York Times, and Words Without Borders, among other publications. Her work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, a Katharine Bakeless Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. She teaches creative writing at the University at Buffalo.
“The Age of Loneliness,” her first solo-authored book, was published by Graywolf in August 2024. It is described as a moving examination of the dangers of loneliness, the surprising histories of ecological loss, and the ways that community science can help us recognize, and maybe even recover, what we’ve learned to live without.
Her translations include Albert Camus’ “The Plague” (Knopf). With Alice Kaplan, she is also the co-author of a book of criticism about the novel called “States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic” (University of Chicago Press, with a French edition translated by Patrick Hersant for Gallimard).
Marris has translated Louis Guilloux’s “Blood Dark” (New York Review Books), Paol Keineg’s “Triste Tristan and Other Poems” (with Rosmarie Waldrop for Burning Deck Press), Geraldine Schwarz’s “Those Who Forget” (Scribner), Jean-Yves Frétigné’s “To Live is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramsci” (University of Chicago Press), Christophe Boltanski’s “The Safe House” (University of Chicago Press), as well as a Proust comic book and experimental translation projects for “Asymptote” and “The Brooklyn Rail.”
Books she has translated have been shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize from the Lukas Prizes, and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize.
Also on March 13, Marris will lead a morning generative writing workshop for students.
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