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02/03/2026 | News release | Distributed by Public on 02/03/2026 12:49

BU’s 2026 Ha Jin Lecturer, Award-Winning Novelist Garth Greenwell, on How Singing, Poetry Have Shaped His Fiction

BU's 2026 Ha Jin Lecturer, Award-Winning Novelist Garth Greenwell, on How Singing, Poetry Have Shaped His Fiction

Author will read from his work at Wednesday's annual lecture

"I am drawn to experiences that defeat language," says writer Garth Greenwell. "I am drawn to these experiences of the body in crisis that challenge our sense of what is representable in language." Photo by Bryan Shutmaat

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BU's 2026 Ha Jin Lecturer, Award-Winning Novelist Garth Greenwell, on How Singing, Poetry Have Shaped His Fiction

Author will read from his work at Wednesday's annual lecture

February 3, 2026
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Over the last decade, Garth Greenwell has earned a reputation as a writer who explores love, desire, intimacy, and loss in lyrical prose. His first two books, What Belongs to You and Cleanness, centered on the experiences of a young gay man teaching and living in Bulgaria, where Greenwell once taught. His latest novel, Small Rain, features the same narrator, now a writer living in the United States, facing a life-threatening medical crisis that forces him to examine the relationships and events that have shaped his life.

The novel won last year's PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The judges' citation noted that Greenwell "has wrought a narrative of illness and identity in visceral detail, conveyed with a precision of language that steals the breath."

"I am drawn to experiences that defeat language, to experiences of the body in crisis that challenge our sense of what is representable in language, says Greenwell, who will read from his work at Boston University as this year's Ha Jin Visiting Lecturer. The event is Wednesday, February 4, at the Alan & Sherry Leventhal Center at 7:30 pm.

BU Today spoke with the author, who is also a critic, a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University, and author of the substack newsletter A Green Thought, about how his early experiences as a singer and poet have shaped his fiction, how writing about sex offers a way to explore bigger questions, and how he approaches writing.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q&A

with Garth Greenwell

BU Today: Your novels are often described as interior. Is that an accurate description?

Greenwell: My interest is really in the experience of a consciousness that is concerned with the world outside itself and with other people. Something I talk about with my students a lot is that if you are interested in consciousness and interiority, something really crucial to remember is that consciousness exists only in bodies. I guess that even more than consciousness, I'm interested in what I call embodiedness, the experience of a consciousness in a body, which means a consciousness in a particular place, in a particular time, with access to a particular world.

BU Today: What Belongs to You, Cleanness, and Small Rain feature the same narrator. Do you think of the books as a trilogy?

I don't think of them as a trilogy. I think of them as kind of an ongoing project. My hope is that each book is autonomous and a kind of fully formed thing that stands on its own, but also that the books sort of interpenetrate and that there are moments of connection between all three.

BU Today: Your work is noted for its lyrical quality. Does your background as a singer and poet influence your writing?

Yes, absolutely. Those two pursuits, opera and poetry, were my education and art-fiction came very late. I wrote What Belongs to You-and I think this continues to be true of my novels-with the tools that I had, which were the tools of poetry and the tools of opera. And I think my models for narrative really are like Benjamin Britten's chamber operas. My sense of narrative comes from operas and my sense of how language works comes from poetry.

BU Today: You've compared your novels to operas. How are they similar?

What Belongs to You moves by seeking out centers of heat. It doesn't move in terms of chronology of event. It doesn't really move in terms of cause and consequence. It moves, as I experience it, sort of from one aria to another, and I think of arias as moments of emotional intensity. And that's even more true in Small Rain. One way of looking at the book-there's almost no plot at all. It's about a guy who is in an ICU and doesn't get out of bed for 10 or 11 days. He lies in his bed and thinks about everything around him and about his past. He keeps spinning up these little arias. And the structure of Cleanness is really like a song cycle.

BU Today: You've described sex as the "densest form of communication." How so?

I think that's probably overstated. But it does seem to me that sex is one of these experiences that is just incredibly dense with meaning. You know, it's so charged, and I think it's charged in ways that we very seldom make explicit to ourselves. Sex, for a fiction writer, allows you to do so much in terms of developing character, exploring relationships. It's also an extraordinary vehicle for examining large questions of history and society.

BU Today: What made you decide to segue from writing poetry to writing fiction?

It really wasn't a decision, and it's something that's very mysterious to me. I really had no aspiration to be a fiction writer, and I really still feel that poetry is by far the superior art, that there's a kind of purity of vocation that is often very muddled, if not lost, in fiction.

There were really two things that happened. One of them was that I left the PhD program at Harvard and began teaching high school, which was a really profound thing for me as a human being and as a writer. It made me much more interested in other people than I had ever been, and in other people as narratives. Being a high school teacher and engaging with young people is to wonder about their vocation and to wonder what is this kid going to become? And I think that got me interested in narrative.

The other thing that happened was that after three years of teaching in Ann Arbor, I moved to Sofia, Bulgaria, and taught there for four years. I think the experience of living in a foreign country for the first time, the experience of speaking another language every day, which changed my relationship to English, somehow the combination of those things made me a novelist. But the experience of it was one of profound confusion-it was one of realizing that I was feeling or hearing sentences that were not broken into lines and it felt like a very experimental process.

BU Today: Your sentences are beautifully constructed. Can you talk about your approach to writing?

It really does feel to me that the sentence is the unit of composition and that I am discovering the world and the characters and the action and situation as I am writing sentences. The most exciting thing I felt when I started writing prose was that I couldn't predict where a sentence was going to go. I would be writing a sentence and suddenly I would feel like the floor dropped out from under me and I was in a different time, and that was bound up with the structure of the sentence. Sentences are at least as exciting, and really more exciting for me than the large scale movements of plot. I want a sentence to feel like an adventure.

Garth Greenwell will read from his work at this year's Ha Jin Visiting Lecture on Wednesday, February 4, at 7:30 pm at the Alan & Sherry Leventhal Center, second floor, 233 Bay State Road. The event is free and open to the public and will be followed by a reception and book signing.

The Ha Jin Visiting Lecturer series, made possible by a gift from former BU trustee Robert J. Hildreth, brings internationally renowned fiction writers to BU to teach master classes and deliver lectures. The series is named for Ha Jin (GRS'93), a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and a College of Arts & Sciences professor of creative writing.

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