Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is the blockbuster event of the season, taking the one of the oldest and still greatest epics of all time - Homer’s Odyssey - and giving it what it always lacked. That is to say: Matt Damon.
And not just Matt Damon, but Zendaya, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Travis Scott, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o, Samantha Morton - and the list goes on. But this roll call of Hollywood celebrities are blips in time compared with the multi-millennia celebrity of Odysseus, Circe, Penelope, Athena, the Cyclops and Poseidon, to name just a few of Homer’s heavy hitters.
Join the Secret Life of Books for a deep dive into the wine-dark seas of Homer and the Odyssey as we ask how this mighty tale shapes English literature from Shakespeare to Keats; Toni Morrison to Margaret Atwood. We’ll talk a bit about who Homer was (if anyone at all), how the epic made its way into written form, and what's up with “Chapman’s Homer,” the first English translation.
And of course no Homeric overview is complete without name-checking Tennyson’s and James Joyce’s versions of the story, both called Ulysses, but in almost every other way wildly different.
Sophie Gee is Professor of English at Princeton University and was inaugural Vice Chancellor's Fellow at University of Sydney. She now co-directs the Eleos Collaboration, which uses humanities and social sciences to rethink the role of universities in our current moment. She's recently published The Barbarous Feast: Eating and Writing in the Eighteenth-Century World (Princeton UP) and she co-hosts the much loved classic books podcast the Secret Life of Books, with Jonty Claypole.
Jonty Claypole is CEO of Red Room Poetry (Australia’s leading poetry organisation), co-host of the Secret Life of Books podcast and producer of Instant Classics and Exploring the Odyssey podcasts (hosted by Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins). He was formerly Director of Arts at the BBC and is author of Words Fail Us: In Defence of Dysfluency (Wellcome/Profile).
