Join one of the most influential writers in America, Jo Ann Beard as she celebrates the UK publication of her career-spanning Collected Works and Cheri, a heart wrenching novella.

The event will initially be broadcast on 23 August at 6.30pm UK time. It will be available to view up to two weeks after the event has ended and can be accessed Worldwide. If you live in a time zone that does not suit the initial broadcast time you can watch it at any point after the initial showing for two weeks. 

If you have any questions, please email [email protected]

Cheri has been living with cancer for many years. Now, she is dying. As she navigates the final weeks of her life, and takes charge of the manner of her death, she is flooded with memories, vivid fragments from childhood, adolescence, marriage and motherhood. These bring her back to the present with a renewed appreciation for the brilliance of life around her: the redemptive love of long friendships, the beauty of the natural world, the miraculous radiance of her daughters.

Jo Ann Beard’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays and in various other anthologies and has recently received the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2022 Award in Literature. Her novella Cheri is a masterpiece of empathy and memory that tracks a heart-breaking but glorious celebration of all the moments of beauty and pain that make an individual life, right up until the very last moments. Jo will be joined in conversation for this event celebrating the publication of her Collected Works in the UK for the very first time. She will explore how humanity shapes her work, the inspiration behind her writing and creating the arresting and distinctive voices that populate her stories. Don’t miss this incredibly special opportunity to join one of America’s leading voices in literature!

"A towering talent… Perhaps instead of an essayist, we should think of her as a poet-naturalist, wedding intuition and observation, and forming from this union something unaccountably yet undeniably real." New York Times Book Review