Carole Phillips Memorial Lecture

Maggie Shipstead is the bestselling author of the novels Astonish Me and Seating Arrangements, the latter of which won the Dylan Thomas Prize and the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. A former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University and the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a longtime travel writer and has frequently contributed articles to Condé Nast Traveler and Departures. Shipstead’s latest bestseller, Great Circle, tells the parallel stories of a bold woman aviator and the actor who portrays her on film almost a century later. “A fat, juicy peach of a novel ... epic in spirit and scope” (The Telegraph UK), it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and chosen as one of 2021’s best books by NPR, The Washington Post, and Time, among others.