Anne Boyer, The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness, 2020.
TALK: Sick Notes — Anne Boyer
Recording of a talk by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and poet Anne Boyer and her blistering memoir, The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness (2019). In her keynote lecture, Boyer discussed the book, which reflects on her experience of breast cancer while deconstructing the gendered, capitalistic regimes that shape cancer treatment and patient experience, bridging a poetics of pain with steely critique.
Sick Notes is an ongoing event series which centres on ill health as a category of experience that provokes diverse linguistic and visual forms. It explores these as critical tools for access, facilitating the translation of liminal and non-normative bodily and mental states. It platforms art works and literary projects as vital in forming the basis for collectivity and activism, challenging the structural conditions that govern illness. Curated by Natasha Hoare and Mariana Lemos.
BIOGRAPHY
Anne Boyer (b. 1973, Topeka, Kansas) is a poet and essayist based in Scotland. Her writing explores illness, care, labour, and the politics of literature, often drawing from her lived experience of disability and precarity. Working across poetry, essay, and translation, Boyer’s work is attentive to the entanglements of vulnerability, resistance, and survival.
Following her diagnosis with an aggressive form of breast cancer in 2014, Boyer began writing on the politics of care, medicine, and mortality. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Undying (2019) reflects on the experience of illness under late capitalism, combining memoir, theory, and poetic inquiry. She is also the author of Garments Against Women (2015), Handbook of Disappointed Fate (2018), My Common Heart (2011), and The Romance of Happy Workers (2006), among others.
Her work has been widely translated, including into Spanish, Persian, Swedish, Icelandic, and Turkish, and she has co-translated 20th-century Venezuelan poetry with Guillermo Parra and Cassandra Gillig. Boyer’s honours include the Cy Twombly Award for Poetry (2018), the Whiting Award (2018), and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize (2020). She is currently a professor at the University of St Andrews.
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