The Harrisburg Book Festival is honored to host renowned translator Emily Wilson for a conversation and signing on her new translation of Homer’s epic poem, The Iliad. Wilson will be in conversation with fellow translator Stephanie McCarter.

This event is free and open to the public; no registration required. Seating is general admission; first come, first served. A book signing will immediately follow the conversation. Purchase of the author’s new book from the Midtown Scholar Bookstore is required for entry to the signing line.

About the Book:

When Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017—revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was “fresh, unpretentious and lean” (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)—critics lauded it as “a revelation” (Susan Chira, New York Times) and “a cultural landmark” (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer’s other great epic—the most revered war poem of all time.

The Iliad roars with the clamor of arms, the bellowing boasts of victors, the fury and grief of loss, and the anguished cries of dying men. It sings, too, of the sublime magnitude of the world—the fierce beauty of nature and the gods’ grand schemes beyond the ken of mortals. In Wilson’s hands, this thrilling, magical, and often horrifying tale now gallops at a pace befitting its legendary battle scenes, in crisp but resonant language that evokes the poem’s deep pathos and reveals palpably real, even “complicated,” characters—both human and divine.

The culmination of a decade of intense engagement with antiquity’s most surpassingly beautiful and emotionally complex poetry, Wilson’s Iliad now gives us a complete Homer for our generation.

About the Authors:

Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance and early modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. In addition to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, she has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca. She lives in Philadelphia.

Stephanie McCarter is Professor of Classical Literature at the University of the South in Sewanee. She has published translated work on Horace and has written for Sewanee Review, Eidolon, Electric Literature and The Millions. McCarter’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into iambic pentameter (included in The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022) was released by Penguin Classics, She has also published a verse translation of Horace’s Epodes, Odes, and Carmen Saeculare (Oklahoma, 2020).