We're delighted to be joined by best-selling author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn to discuss his celebrated new translation of The Odyssey, and to reflect upon the impact that reading the classics can have on a life. In conversation with Adam Biles.

Free & open to all. Places limited. Arrive early to avoid disappointment. Most events take place on our first floor, which is accessible by stairs. If you have any concerns about access, please don't hesitate to contact us.

With his Odyssey, Daniel Mendelsohn has created a momentous new work, hailed by classicists and poets alike – a translation to stand with those of E. V. Rieu and Robert Fagles.

Setting aside the streamlining, modernizing approach of many recent translations, Mendelsohn artfully reproduces the epic’s formal qualities – meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance – and in so doing restores to Homer’s master work its archaic grandeur. His expansive six-beat line, far closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each of Homer’s verses line for line, without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original.

The result is the richest, most precise, and most musical Odyssey in English, one that fully conveys its oral poetics while bringing to vivid life the gripping adventure, profound human insight and powerful themes that make Homer’s work resonate some twenty-eight centuries after its composition. Supported by an extensive introduction and the fullest notes and commentary currently available, Mendelsohn’s Odyssey is poised to become the authoritative English-language version of this magnificent, endlessly enjoyable masterpiece.