Maria Dahvana Headley
“I’m deeply interested in the way we’ve used hero myths to construct political narratives, and the ways we’ve used them to justify violence and injustice against “others” whomever the others may be.”
“Beowulf is an ancient tale of men battling monsters, but Headley has made it wholly modern, with language as piercing and relevant as Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning album ‘DAMN.’ With scintillating inversions and her use of au courant idiom—the poem begins with the word ‘Bro!’ and Queen Wealhtheow is ‘hashtag: blessed’—Headley asks one to consider not only present conflicts in light of those of the past, but also the line between human and inhuman, power and powerlessness, and the very nature of moral transformation, the ‘suspicion that at any moment a person might shift from hero into howling wretch.’ The women of Beowulf have often been sidelined. Not so here.”
“Brash and belligerent, lunatic and invigorating, with passages of sublime poetry punctuated by obscenities and social-media shorthand.”
“Smart, tough modern flip of Beowulf, told through Grendel’s mother.”
“The most surprising novel I’ve read this year. It’s a bloody parody of suburban sanctimony and a feminist revision of macho heroism. In this brash appropriation of the Anglo-Saxon epic, Headley swoops from comedy to tragedy, from the drama of brunch to the horrors of war.”
Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times-bestselling author of eight books, most recently Beowulf: A New Translation (MCD x FSG, 2020), which Vox called, “lively and vigorous.” The Mere Wife (MCD x FSG, 2018), a contemporary adaptation of Beowulf, was named by the Washington Post as one of its Notable Works of Fiction in 2018. She’s written for both teenagers, Magonia (HarperCollins, 2015) and Aerie (HarperCollins,2016), and adults, in a variety of genres and forms. Her memoir, The Year of Yes (Hyperion, 2006) is “laugh out loud funny” according to Entertainment Weekly. Headley’s short fiction has been shortlisted for the Nebula, Shirley Jackson, Tiptree, and World Fantasy Awards, and for the 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been anthologized in many year’s bests; a collection is under contract to FSG. Her essays on gender, chronic illness, politics, propaganda, and mythology have been published and covered in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Harvard’s Nieman Storyboard, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by The MacDowell Colony, Arte Studio Ginestrelle, and the Sundance Institute’s Theatre Lab, among other organizations. She's taught writing in the master's program at Sarah Lawrence, and delivered masterclasses and writing lectures at Dartmouth, Northwestern, Wesleyan Nebraska, and Newman University, among others.
When asked by Slate about her use of contemporary slang in her Beowulf translation, Headley responded, “My whole career has been grabbing bits of folklore and repurposing them, and testing out different meters and repurposing them. That’s the writer I am. But in terms of using some of the more recent slang, I was really just interested in how much of the English language has been constructed out of slang always. That’s just the nature of the language. It’s a language that grabs culturally, jumps class.”
She grew up in the high desert of Idaho on a survivalist sled dog ranch, where she spent summers plucking the winter coat from her father’s wolf.
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(c) Beowulf Sheehan
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