Derek Attridge

Derek Attridge was educated in South Africa and obtained a PhD from Cambridge University. He is the author or editor of thirty books on literary theory, the history and forms of poetry, South African writing, and the modernist novel. Among his publications are Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (1988), Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (1995), The Singularity of Literature (2004), J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (2004), The Cambridge History of South African Literature (with David Attwell, 2011), Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (2013), The Work of Literature (2015), The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers (2019), and Forms of Modernist Fiction: From James Joyce to Tom McCarthy (2023). He serves on twenty editorial boards, and has held awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the National Humanities Center, and many others. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and has been Visiting Professor at universities in the USA, Italy, South Africa, and France, and Visiting Fellow at All Souls and St. Catherine’s Colleges, Oxford. Having taught in England, Scotland, and the USA, he recently retired from the English Department at the University of York, England.