Ben Lerner for Transcription

"Lerner is a linguistic magician and here is another triumphant and beautiful sleight of hand" -- Daisy Johnson

For over two-decades, Ben Lerner has been one of the most interesting voices in both poetry and literary fiction. Now, for the first time, the McArthur Genius Grant winning author of The Topeka School, Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04, and several magnificent collections of poetry, joins us in Edinburgh to celebrate his latest novel, Transcription.

A writer returns to his college town, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor. But after he drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas's house with no recording device - a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess. What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich and impoverish our connections to each other, that store and obliterate our memories, and a moving exploration of the relationships that make us who we are.

BEN LERNER is the author of three internationally acclaimed novels, Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04 and The Topeka School, as well as several books of poetry and collaborations with visual artists. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, and been a finalist for National Book Award in poetry and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, among other honours. He lives in Brooklyn.