Poetry-in-the-Round hosts fiction and nonfiction writer Elif Batuman on Tuesday, November 17 at 7 p.m. ET in a free online event.

Elif Batuman's first novel, The Idiot, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in fiction. She is also the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. She is a staff writer at the New Yorker and has a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford. She lives in New York City.

The New York Times writes of Batuman's work:

Herself the daughter of Turkish immigrants and a graduate of Harvard, Batuman is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010). That book was a witty and melancholy tour de force about reading and love and the pleasures of travel as against tourism. That same voice is poured into "The Idiot." It's memorable to witness Selin, via Batuman, absorb the world around her. Each paragraph is a small anthology of well-made observations.

Kirkus calls The Idiot "self-aware, cerebral, and delightful," and The Guardian calls it a "capacious book that creates an alternative world for the reader to inhabit in a manner comparable to the Russian novels that Batuman loves."

The event is free and open to the public. All are welcome. Register here.

About the Series:
Poetry-in-the-Round has brought some of the best contemporary writers from around the world to Seton Hall University for the past three decades. Some of those visitors have included Jennifer Egan, Susan Choi, Dinaw Mengestu, Ben Lerner, Christine Schutt, Heidi Julavits, Ben Marcus, Jenny Offill, Gary Shteyngart, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Karen Russell, Alexandra Kleeman, Helen Phillips, Major Jackson, Deborah Eisenberg, Susan Orlean, Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Carol Oates, Salman Rushdie, Russell Banks, C.K. Williams, Nadine Gordimer, Jamaica Kincaid, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, and many others. The series has worked to bring established and up-and-coming new writers to the attention of Seton Hall students and the community.

Categories: Arts and Culture, Education