38. WHY LYRICS MATTER: BRIAN BOYD

Professor Brian Boyd is the world’s leading Nabokov scholar, as well as a professor of English at The University of Auckland, with a wide interest in language and story.

His most recent Nabokov publication, Stalking Nabokov (2011), collected some of Boyd’s essays from the last two decades of his long engagement with Nabokov’s life and work.

In 2009, Boyd published On the Origin of Stories, a book that explains why we are compulsively storytelling animals.

His latest work Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2012), explores why poems can both haunt and daunt us.

Join him in conversation with poet and critic Iain Sharp.