Heather Clark - Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

Newcastle Writers Festival

In the final episode of this year's Stories To You series, we have collaborated with Caroline Baum, host of the Life Sentences podcast, to bring you a conversation with American biographer Professor Heather Clark about her acclaimed biography of poet Sylvia Plath.

Caroline describes Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, which has been nominated for a 2021 Pulitzer Prize, as a "fastidious, forensic and granular account" of the artist's early life and brilliant college days in the US before her explosive encounter with British poet Ted Hughes. With unprecedented access to archives of Plath papers and other previously unavailable material, Clark provides the most comprehensive and psychologically complex portrait to date of a much misunderstood and mythologised artist.

Red Comet is published in Australia by Penguin Random House.

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