Jeff VanderMeer (Image provided/Ditte Valente)
New York Times best-selling novelist Jeff VanderMeer will deliver the 2025 Walter Harding Lecture at SUNY Geneseo. VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander; the Borne novels (Borne, The Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts); and the Southern Reach series (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, and Absolution), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Paramount Pictures.
The talk will take place on Wednesday, September 24 at 4:15 p.m. in Doty Recital Hall. The Harding Lecture is free and open to the public.
Over a 35-year career, VanderMeer has been a four-time World Fantasy Award winner and 20-time nominee. For 11 years, he served as the co-director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen SF/fantasy writing camp he helped found, located at Wofford College in South Carolina.
Joshua Rothman, cultural critic at The New Yorker, has dubbed Jeff VanderMeer "the weird Thoreau," calling VanderMeer's "eco-sci-fi" novels "experiments in psychedelic nature writing, in the tradition of [19th-century American naturalist and philosopher Henry David] Thoreau, and meditations on the theme of epistemic pessimism, in the tradition of Kafka," and likening aspects of VanderMeer's fiction to that of H.P. Lovecraft and Virginia Woolf.
VanderMeer frequently speaks and writes on issues related to Florida (where he is a longtime resident), climate change, and storytelling, including at Vanderbilt, DePaul, MIT, the Key West Literary Seminar, Yale, and the Guggenheim. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Esquire, TIME, Current Affairs, Vulture, and the Los Angeles Times.
The Department of English and Creative Writing's yearly Harding Lecture honors the life and legacy of SUNY Distinguished Professor of English Walter Harding (1917–1996). Harding, one of the 20th century's foremost scholars of Henry David Thoreau, taught in SUNY Geneseo's English department from 1956 to 1982. The lecture is made possible through the generous support of the Harding family.