Looking to Art, At Home and Abroad with Benjamin Moser

A conversation with Benjamin Moser and Pamela Druckerman at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 24/04/2024 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
In 2002, at the age of twenty-five, Benjamin Moser moved from New York to the Netherlands. In search of places to anchor him in his new home, he began paying visits to Dutch art museums, where he developed a fascination with the “Dutch Masters.” Separated from these artists by time and cultural heritage, he realized the question they asked, and that he asks now, is the same: why do we make art? In his new book, The Upside-Down World, Moser delves into the details of the lives of these artists, drawing from scant historical records to generate imaginative musings and biographical accounts of the beloved painters.
Moser has also produced several other award-winning biographies and translations. His 2009 biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector has been instrumental in securing Lispector’s rich literary legacy among global audiences. His 2019 biography of Susan Sontag was widely praised and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Through his biographies and his translations, Moser bridges both linguistic and cultural gaps, deftly introducing the complexities of foreign literature and the lives of international artistic figures to the English-speaking world.
Moser is joined in conversation by Pamela Druckerman, a French-American cultural writer and journalist. Druckerman has published five books and has written many pieces for The New York Times International Edition, The Atlantic, and Le Monde, among other publications.
About the speakers:
Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, 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, including through publishing her complete works in English, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. For Sontag: Her Life and Work, he won the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, was published in October 2023. He lives in the Netherlands and France.
Pamela Druckerman is a journalist and the author of five books including Bringing Up Bébé, which has been translated into 31 languages. She won an Emmy for The Forger, a New York Times documentary about a French teenager in WWII. Her op-eds, essays, articles and reviews have been published in the The New York Times, The Economist, The Atlantic, Le Monde and many other publications.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.