“Christopher Isherwood Inside Out”: Katherine Bucknell in conversation with Pico Iyer

Katherine Bucknell’s magisterial biography on Christopher Isherwood was published in the summer of 2024 after decades of research, much of it conducted at The Huntington, which houses the largest collection of Isherwood papers in the world. She will speak about her process of researching and crafting the biography, as well as her experience editing Isherwood’s diaries. Joining her will be Pico Iyer, who has read Isherwood’s writings for half a century and also introduced a book of Isherwood’s travels.

About the Speakers

Katherine Bucknell is the editor of four volumes of Christopher Isherwood’s diaries; The Animals, a volume of letters between Isherwood and his partner, Don Bachardy; and W. H. Auden’s Juvenilia: Poems 1922–1928. She is the author of several books, including Canarino, Leninsky Prospekt, What You Will, and +1. Bucknell is the executive director of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, a founder of the W. H. Auden Society, and a co-editor of Auden Studies. She lives in London.

Pico Iyer is the author of 16 books, translated into 23 languages, most recently The Half Known Life, a national bestseller that was named a book of the year by the New York Times, The New Yorker, NPR, and Time magazine. His next work, Aflame, will be released in January 2025. The Huntington acquired Iyer’s papers in April 2021. His archive represents the last three decades of his writing career.