CEU Press cordially invites you to the book launch of
The Poet & The Baroness
W.H. Auden and Stella Musulin, a Friendship
with author MICHAEL O’SULLIVAN, author, and MARKO MUSULIN, son of Stella Musulin,
and other special guests.
Time and venue:
29 SEPTEMBER, 2023 / 4 P.M. / FRIDAY
AUGUSTINERTRAKT / Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Josefplatz 1, 1010 Wien
About the book:
Michael O’Sullivan’s latest work soon to be published by CEU Press offers a new and intimate perspective on one of the 20th century’s greatest poets.
Poet W. H. Auden was a writer who sought a depth of clarity and unity in divided and confusing times. Now, on the 50th anniversary of his death, his work remains as relevant and prescient as it was in his own day. Central European University Press is proud to announce the publication of Michael O’Sullivan’s new work, The Poet & The Baroness, a book which offers an intimate perspective on Auden using the previously unpublished letters and private journals between the poet and Baroness Stella Musulin, a celebrated Welsh-Austrian intellectual and MI6 covert operative in Vienna before the Second World War.
Auden and Stella’s correspondence not only offers a uniquely candid and humane vantage on the poet, but invites readers into an intimate intellectual conversation between rare friends, all against the backdrop of Austria’s complex political, social, and cultural history during the Cold War years.
Michael O’Sullivan’s engagement with these materials also yields new critical insights into Auden’s last, prolific, creative period. While Auden’s ties to the UK and US have been thoroughly explored, The Poet & The Baroness sheds new light on the ‘Austrian Auden’ – not only his late experimentation with prose, essays and haiku poetry, but his personal reflections on identity, aging, friendship, and death.
About Michael O’Sullivan: Michael O'Sullivan's last work was Patrick Leigh Fermor: Noble Encounters, in which he revisits the trajectory of one section of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s famous pedestrian excursion from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople meeting many of the old Hungarian families Leigh Fermor stayed with during his famous 1934 visit to Hungary and Transylvania. He is the author of bestselling biographies of Mary Robinson, Ireland’s first woman president and later UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. He has also written biographies of the founding father of the modern Irish state, Seán Lemass and of the playwright Brendan Behan.