The Booker Prize-winning author of Life of Pi discusses his new novel, a masterpiece of myth, history and domesticity, at an event hosted by Erica Wagner.
The past is never done with: always the song continues.
Harlow Donne has devoted his life to the Classical world. When a chance comes up to study an obscure collection of papyrus fragments at Oxford University, he seizes it, though it means leaving his daughter and fracturing marriage back home in Canada.
Under his gaze—as the sole translator and interpreter of The Psoad —the text unlocks echoes of Ancient Greece into the present day, and a personal message to his beloved child appears.
Despite the 3,000-year gap between the two, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of ambition, love and grief.
Yann Martel is the author of Life of Pi, for which he was awarded the 2002 Man Booker Prize, and three other novels, as well as a short story collection, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios.
Erica Wagner is deputy comment editor at The Observer. For 17 years she was literary editor of The Times and is the author of six books of fiction and non-fiction. She has twice been a judge of the Booker Prize and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023. In 2025 she was awarded a Public Humanities Fellowship by the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her new novel, Wash, is published by Salt in May.