Dec 19, 2016 Book Collector’s Evening to Feature Pulitzer Prize Winning Author

Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer Prize winning author and weekly book columnist for The Washington Post, will speak at the J. Willard Marriott Library’s Book Collector’s Evening, a benefit event for Special Collections. The event, which also includes a reception, silent auction, and dinner, is sponsored by the Friends of the Marriott Library and will take place on Wednesday, February 15, 2017 at 6:00 p.m.

Mr. Dirda will discuss his book Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books. He has also published the memoir An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland and four previous collections of essays: Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments, Bound to Please: An Extraordinary One-Volume Education, Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life, and Classics for Pleasure. In 2012 his biographical/critical study, On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling, received an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

Dirda graduated with Highest Honors in English from Oberlin College and earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature (focusing on medieval studies and European romanticism) from Cornell University. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and several other literary periodicals, as well as an occasional lecturer and college teacher. His current project is an appreciation of popular fiction of the late 19th and early 20th century. He lives just outside Washington D.C. with his wife Marian Peck Dirda, senior prints and drawings conservator at the National Gallery of Art. They have three grown sons.

Of Interest

Mr. Dirda is also a member of The Baker Street Irregulars, the literary society dedicated to the study of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Victorian world.

His presentation at the Alta Club will take place 130 years after the publication of A Study in Scarlet (the first Sherlock Homes story which is focused on Utah) and ninety-four years after Conan Doyle’s visit to Salt Lake when he spoke at the Alta Club.

Reservations: please contact Judy Jarrow at Judy.jarrow@utah.edu or 801-581-3421 by Feb. 10.