Ruth Ozeki — The Typing Lady
Author Ruth Ozeki discusses her new short story collection exploring thresholds of childhood ambition, desire, mid-life reinvention, and the clarity of age.
Why we picked this
Ozeki writes about the turning points we barely notice until years later — her first story collection should be as quietly devastating as her novels.
Ruth Ozeki, whose novels A Tale for the Time Being and The Book of Form and Emptiness have earned devoted readerships on both sides of the Atlantic, brings her first short story collection to the Southbank Centre. The Typing Lady and Other Fictions finds its characters standing at thresholds — childhood ambition giving way to youthful desire, mid-life reinvention, and the particular clarity that comes with age.
Ozeki is a writer whose work moves between the deeply personal and the cosmically expansive, informed by her practice as a Zen Buddhist priest. Her fiction has a quality of attentiveness that makes even small moments feel weighted with significance.
The conversation takes place in the intimate Purcell Room at the Southbank Centre.