“Our most irresistible literary critic,” says The New York Times Book Review. Daniel Mendelsohn is an elegant stylistic polymath – a reviewer but also an essayist, memoirist, classicial scholar and translator of the Greek poet CP Cavafy. In his memoir The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million he excavates his family history; in his essay collection Waiting For The Barbarians he disses Mad Men as “melodrama rather than drama”. His new project is a literature-and-life book, recounting the year he spent reading The Odyssey with his late father and the revelations of that experience. He speaks with Ian Wedde.

Auckland Writers Festival podcasts are also available via itunes so you can download and listen on the go.