For immediate release
April 4, 2001

NOVELIST SUSAN SONTAG TO SPEAK
AT MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. – Distinguished novelist, essayist, and critic Susan Sontag will read from work in progress and her novel "In America", the winner of the 2000 National Book Award for fiction, on Thursday, April 12, at 7:30 p.m. in the Art Building’s Gamble Auditorium. A discussion and book signing will follow the talk, which is free and open to the public.

While on campus, Sontag will conduct a seminar for students and discuss her recent work with faculty members who are participating in the seminar Writing Beyond the Academy. Both events are sponsored by the Weissman Center for Leadership as part of its ongoing program to support collegewide engagement with leaders in the arts and public life. The talk is part of the Mary Lyon Lecture Series.

Sontag’s influence has been felt in many arenas of American culture and throughout the world. A prolific writer, she has written essays on such diverse subjects as aesthetics, photography, illness, and human rights. She has published novels, short stories, and plays and has written and directed films. Among her works are "Styles of Radical Will" (1969), "On Photography" (1976), "Illness and Metaphor" (1978), "AIDS and Its Metaphors" (1988), and the novels "The Benefactor" (1963), "Death Kit" (1967), and "The Volcano Lover" (1992).

In 1993, Sontag traveled to Sarajevo several times to stage Samuel Beckett’s play "Waiting for Godot."

Sontag has received numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award (1977) and the Academy of Sciences and Literature Award (Germany, 1979). In 1990, she received a five-year fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation. Recently, she was awarded the coveted Jerusalem Prize, awarded at the Jerusalem International Book Fair to writers whose work explores the freedom of individuals in society. She is the second woman writer (after Simone de Beauvoir) to receive this honor.

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