In Conversation: Sharon Olds & Nick Laird

The Seamus Heaney Centre’s Professor Nick Laird, joins US poet Sharon Olds, in conversation with students from Queen’s University. Their conversation took place in November 2020, and is the first in a series of online events with Nick and other internationally renowned poets.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Sharon Olds is one of contemporary poetry’s leading voices. Born in San Francisco in 1942, she studied at Stanford in the ‘60s, and completed her PhD at Columbia University in 1974. Since then she has taught at numerous schools and workshops, and currently teaches Creative Writing at New York University.

Sharon has won an astonishing number of awards and accolades for her work. For Stag’s Leap (2012), which chronicles the dissolution of her marriage, she was awarded both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. In 2015 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2016 received the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award. Most recently, she has been shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize for her latest collection, Arias.

International Poets’ Series