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Dalloway Day comes to Turkey on June 20

Posted in books, events, tagged , , , , , on Wednesday 17 June 2026| Leave a Comment »

Dalloway Day is coming to Turkey. Celebrated in London last Saturday, June 13, it will be celebrated in Turkey one week later, on June 20.

It arrives just in time for the 35th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Woolf and Sound, which will be held June 24-28 in Istanbul.

The Woolf Arts Archive is sponsoring the Turkish Dalloway Day event, “Bir Yazarı Yaşatmak: Virginia Woolf Ankara’da” / “Keeping an Author Alive: Virginia Woolf in Ankara”, at 16.30 Turkey Time and KültKavaklıdere will host.

The day’s focus

The event will focus on works that reimagine Virginia Woolf as a writer, character and literary figure. It will consider how Woolf continues to live through rewriting, translation, fiction, and the arts, and how literature can give renewed voice to an author after her death.

Maggie Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhattan will also be part of this conversation. The novel’s recent Turkish publication offers an especially timely point of connection for the Ankara Dalloway Day event, bringing together questions of Woolf’s afterlives, literary return, translation, and contemporary reception in Turkey.

The day’s speakers

  • Prof. Dr. Mine Özyurt Kılıç
  • Atahan Mahir Karabiber
  • Tuğba Çanakçı

Poster image: Elisa Kay Sparks, “Encaustic Collages: Virginia Woolf”

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Virginia Woolf in Manhattan now in Turkish

Posted in books, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , , on Monday 15 June 2026| Leave a Comment »

We will have two bits of news from Turkey for you this week — just in time for the 35th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Woolf and Sound, which will be held June 24-28 in Istanbul.

Here is the first news item. The second will be posted later this week, so stay tuned.

Maggie Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhattan has now been published in Turkish by Eriken Yayınları, under the title Virginia Woolf Manhattan’da.

Translated by Prof. Dr. Mine Özyurt Kılıç, the novel brings together London, New York and Istanbul through a playful literary dialogue with Virginia Woolf’s works, from Mrs Dalloway and Orlando to A Room of One’s Own and The Waves.

The cover design, created by artist Elif Okur Tolun, also nods to Vanessa Bell’s legacy, gently recalling her contribution to the visual world of Woolf’s books—as Woolf’s sister and a key figure in the Bloomsbury circle, Bell famously decorated many of the early Hogarth Press editions of Woolf’s works with her own artwork, helping to shape their distinctive visual identity.

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Five Woolf novels among The Guardian’s 100 best

Posted in books, tagged , on Thursday 4 June 2026| Leave a Comment »

The Guardian newspaper asked 170 novelists, critics and academics for their top 10 works of fiction, ranked in order. Five of the 100 were novels by Virginia Woolf.

Woolf scholar Vara Neverow shared this information via the VWoolf Listserv, and Emilia Castellucci, membership secretary for the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, passed it on to members.

Here are Woolf’s five novels that made The Guardian list:

  • Jacob’s Room (#90 of 100)
  • The Waves (55)
  • Orlando (54)
  • Mrs Dalloway (14) and
  • To the Lighthouse (4).

Comparison to previous poll years

The Guardian ran similar polls in 2003 and 2015, and here is what has changed.

  • More female writers made the list. Thirty-six out of 100 this year,  compared with 21 in 2015 and a paltry 16 in 2003
  • Of women writers, only Jane Austen’s Emma and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein made the top 10 of both previous lists. This year, Emma was number 13 and Frankenstein number 30.

Which novel made the top of the list this year? It is Middlemarch by George Eliot, one of Woolf’s favorites. Of it, she said:

the magnificent book […] with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’

Stephen King, David Nicholls, Bernardine Evaristo, Salman Rushdie, Anne Enright, Yiyun Li, Elif Shafak, Ian McEwan, Maggie O’Farrell, Colm Tóibín, Lorrie Moore and Katherine Rundell were among those polled. All were asked for their top 10, ranked in order. Any book published in English, but originally written in any language, was eligible.

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Taught Virginia Woolf’s essays? Beth wants to hear from you

Posted in books, essays, tagged , , on Tuesday 12 May 2026| Leave a Comment »

Beth Rigel Daugherty is working on a sequel to Virginia Woolf’s Apprenticeship: Becoming an Essayist for Edinburgh University Press, and if you have taught Woolf’s essays, she wants to hear from you.

Her request and questions

Share your thoughts about teaching and learning from Virginia Woolf’s essays.

I am particularly interested in how Woolf’s essays affect and influence teachers. – Beth Rigel Daughterty

Beth’s sequel looks at Woolf’s essays through a pedagogical lens. Here are the questions she poses:

  • What have Woolf’s essays taught you about the process of learning and/or the process of teaching?
  • What does she say to you about how and why we educate?
  • How do you use Woolf’s essays in your teaching, whether formal or informal, inside or outside the academy?
  • Would you be willing to share your thoughts with me (Beth) by filling out a survey or talking with me on Zoom?

Details and deadline

More details — her  rationale and goal, eight survey questions, permission forms, and contact information — can be found at this link. Beth asks that respondents fill out this Google Form or email answers to woolfessaysurvey@gmail.com, preferably by August 31, 2027.

Ever gracious, Beth adds, “Thank you so much for considering my request.”

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Woolf scholars in the news

Posted in books, photographs, photography, short stories, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , on Saturday 2 May 2026| 2 Comments »

Here is news about projects from Woolf scholars around the globe.

Maggie Humm and Snapshots

Maggie Humm’s new book, Snapshots: Autobiography, Virginia Woolf, Writing and the Visual, published by Edinburgh University Press, is now out and receiving much acclaim. Read about it on USA Book DNA and on the EUP blog.

The book provides a survey and analysis of feminist criticism from the 1970s and an historical account of UK women’s writing from 1900 to the present. It also brings together Humm’s pioneering work on feminist literary criticism, Virginia Woolf, film and visual cultures.

Look below for the code to get a 30 percent discount on Snapshots from EUP.

Humm is an emeritus professor and vice-chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain whose last book was The Bloomsbury Photographs.

Yolanda Hartshorne and Woolf’s shorter fiction

“A Spatial Reading of Virginia Woolf’s Shorter Fiction” a Ph.D. thesis by Yolanda Hartshorne is now openly accessible online under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND).

In it, she places Woolf’s texts in their non-fictional historical contexts in an effort to understand the societal expectations of the times.

Hartshorne is also the author of “The Business of Marriage in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Phyllis and Rosamond”: Conventional and Transgressive Spaces” and was awarded Distinction Cum Laude from the University of Oviedo, Spain.

Martin Ferguson Smith and two books

Martin Ferguson Smith, professor emeritus of Classics, Durham University and member of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain who is now in his eighties, has two new books out.

  • Urbi et Orbi: The Epicurean Inscription and Prescription of Diogenes of Oinoanda Tab Edizioni, Rome, March 2026, paperback and Open Access
  • Martin the Epicurean (autobiography), SilverWood, Bristol, 15 April 2026, paperback and ebook. For other information, including about the earlier books of the writer’s eighties, In and Out of Bloomsbury (2021; paperback 2023) and The Artist Helen Coombe (2023), visit http://www.martinfergusonsmith.com

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