Ep. 23: Benjamin Moser

In the season finale, Sarah Valente sat down with Pulitzer Prize winning author Benjamin Moser, for a virtual conversation about their shared love of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. Ben is responsible for making Clarice widely available in translation in the English-speaking world. Because of his work, Sarah was able to organize a single author course on Clarice Lispector last spring, where American university students, for the first time in their lives, heard the name and studied the works of this beloved giant of Brazilian literature. Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017, and his latest book, Sontag: Her Life and Work, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020.

This conversation was recorded on August 25, 2021.