Christian Bök

• Writer in Residence Talk, November 2023

Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia (2001), a globally renowned bestseller, which has won the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. Bök is currently working on The Xenotext — a project that requires him to engineer a deathless bacterium so that its DNA might become a durable archive that stores a poem for eternity. Bök is one of the earliest founders of Conceptualism (a poetic school of global renown, responsible for the creation of the website UbuWeb). Bök has earned many accolades for his virtuoso recitals of ‘sound-poems’ (particularly Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters); moreover, he has starred, not only as the ‘Three-Horned Enemy’ in the opera The Princess of the Stars by R. Murray Schafer, but also as the ‘Poet of the Future’ in the movie The Future Is Now! by Jim Brown (et al.). Bök has exhibited his artworks at dozens of galleries around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, The Power Plant in Toronto, and the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. Bök is a Fellow in the Royal Society of Canada — and he now works, full time, as an artist at his studio in Melbourne, Australia.