March 18, 2003
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@ sa.ucsb.edu
Acclaimed author Peter Matthiessen presents the 40th Annual Edwin & Jean Corle Memorial Lecture at UCSB Campbell Hall
Summary Facts:
- Peter Matthiessen
- An Evening with the Author
- Award-winning author of The Snow Leopard and At Play in the Fields of the Lord
- Acclaimed as one of our greatest nature writers
- The 40th Annual Edwin & Jean Corle Memorial Lecture
- Wednesday, April 23
- 8 pm / UCSB Campbell Hall
- Free event
- Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at 893-3535
Internationally-recognized naturalist, nonfiction writer and novelist Peter Matthiessen, author of 28 books, will present the 40th Annual Edwin & Jean Corle Memorial Lecture on Wednesday, April 23 at 8 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall. This is a free event.
Co-founder of The Paris Review, Peter Matthiessen has spent much of his life in places at best ignored and at worst unwanted by the contemporary world. His accounts of wildlife and human lives in Peru, Nepal, New Guinea and the Americas have earned him three National Book Award nominations, a 1979 National Book Award for The Snow Leopard, a permanent place in the White House library, and consideration as this country’s most important chronicler of vanishing ways and resources. He writes about disappearing cultures, oppressed people, and exotic wildlife and landscapes, combining scientific observation with lyrical, intellectual prose that connects the world of art and the world of the natural sciences.
One of his most recent books The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes (2001) chronicles his journeys throughout the world in a quest to study this enchanting family of birds, many on the verge of extinction, and their struggle to survive in a rapidly developing world. Another recent book Tigers in the Snow (2000) details the story of the Siberian Tiger Project, recording the plight of these magnificent animals and the adventures of the scientists and villagers around them.
Praise for Matthiessen’s work is nearly universal. The Christian Science Monitor claims, “Peter Matthiessen has always been a writer of wide sweep and small moments, large concerns balancing lyricism, delight balancing a well-earned skepticism about where the world is heading.” The Los Angeles Times states, “[Matthiessen’s] body of work in the last four decades is among the most impressive by any living American writer....He has an informed understanding of the broad cultural, historical, and political context of the places and peoples he encounters, and an extraordinary talent for serendipitous adventure.” And The New York Times simply asserts that he is “our greatest modern nature writer.”
Matthiessen’s nonfiction work includes The Tree Where Man Was Born (1972), Indian Country (1984) Men’s Lives (1986), and In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1991). His fiction includes At Play in the Fields of the Lord (written in 1965 and made into a motion picture directed by Hector Babenco in 1991), Far Tortuga (1975), and the powerful Watson trilogy—Killing Mister Watson (1991), Lost Man’s River (1997) and Bone by Bone (1999).
A 1991 Laureate of the Global Honor Roll of the United Nations Environment Programme, Matthiessen has won numerous honors. Among them are the Gold Medal in Natural History from the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, the Ambassador Award from the English Speaking Union, the John Burroughs Medal, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, and the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation Award. Matthiessen was recently honored with a 2002 Lifetime Achievement Award by the Lannan Foundation.
About his work Matthiessen has claimed, “I like to hear and smell the countryside, the land my characters inhabit. I don’t want these characters to step off the page, I want them to step out of the landscape.”
Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, books by Peter Matthiessen will be available for purchase and signing at the event. This talk, the 40th Annual Edwin & Jean Corle Memorial Lecture, is presented by the UCSB Library and UCSB Arts & Lectures, and is sponsored by KEYT 1250 AM.
For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.