The Sewanee School of Letters is proud to announce that our 2025 John Grammer Fellow will be Megan Nolan. The award, made possible by a gift from the Blake & Bailey Family Fund, brings a noted writer or scholar to Sewanee for an extended visit each summer during the School of Letters’ academic term. The John Grammer Fellow is named in honor of founding School of Letters Director John Grammer. The reading is a part of the School of Letters Summer Reading and Lecture Series.

Megan Nolan will read in the Naylor Auditorium of Gailor Hall at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, June 18. A reception will follow in the Atrium. All are invited.

Megan Nolan is an Irish writer based in New York. Her debut novel “Acts of Desperation” was published in 2021 and was an international bestseller, translated into fourteen languages. Her second, “Ordinary Human Failings,” published in 2023, was shortlisted for the Orwell prize for Political Fiction, the Nero Prize for Fiction, The Gordon Burn Prize, The Royal Society of Literature Encore Award, and longlisted for the Women’s Prize.

She is currently at work on her first book of nonfiction.

School of Letters Director Justin Taylor said, “There’s so much to admire about Megan Nolan’s work as both a novelist and a journalist it’s hard to decide where to start. She is, in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s words, ‘a huge literary talent.’ Her first novel, ‘Acts of Desperation’ is a dark unflinching study of obsession, abjection, and isolation. Her second novel, ‘Ordinary Human Failings,’ which I had the privilege of reviewing for the Washington Post, breathes fresh life into the crime novel while interrogating many of that genre’s biases and blind spots. As I wrote at the time, ‘Nolan’s prose is clean and exacting, with an almost clinical interest in the power of shame: class shame, sexual shame, national shame, the shame of the addict. It seems to rank high among Nolan’s writerly principles that the cure for shame is honesty, however ugly the truth is.’ These days, such a principle seems to be rarer than ever, thus I am all the more pleased to be bringing Nolan to Sewanee this summer as our 2025 Grammer Fellow.”

Visit<https://letters.sewanee.edu/&g...; for more information on the Summer Reading Series.