On 1st and 2nd February, 2016 Holberg Laureate Stephen Greenblatt will be featured at the Jaipur Literature Festival.
As part of a collaboration between the Holberg Prize and Jaipur Literature Festival, Holberg Laureate Stephen Greenblatt will be featured at two events at the 2025 JLF.
The second event gets its title from Greenblatt’s latest book, Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud.
In Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud (2024), Stephen Greenblatt and co-author Adam Phillips explore the powerful theme of second chances in life. Drawing on Shakespeare’s plays and Freud’s theories, they examine stories of transformation, renewal, and the enduring hope of redemption. In conversation with Paul Smith, Greenblatt weaves through the tales of Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, and more, revealing how literature allows us to rehearse and understand the complexities of change, healing and the deep-seated hope for redemption despite fate and circumstance.
The event will feature Stephen Greenblatt in conversation with Paul Smith, Director of British Council Germany.
Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt (photo: Marit Hommedal, NTB Scanpix / The Holberg Prize).
Stephen Greenblatt is an American literary historian and author, and the 2016 Holberg Laureate. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. Greenblatt is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature. He is one of the founders of new historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as “cultural poetics”. His works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term. Greenblatt’s many books include Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004), and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011).