Host Alex Usher speaks with novelist, Randy Boyagoda, about his new novel, Lords of Serendipity.
They discuss what distinguishes Boyagoda’s novel from the traditional campus fiction genre, including its focus on multiple universities, international students, and the global higher education system. The conversation explores the pressures and incentives that shape universities, from international tuition and admissions to the ways students, professors, and administrators can become caught in systems of competition, ambition, and financial pressure.
The episode also considers the moral compromises that can emerge within higher education, and what fiction can reveal about the people and institutions navigating those pressures.
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist who writes about books and ideas for publications including The Atlantic, the New York Times, and the Financial Times of London. His fiction has been nominated for the Giller Prize and IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Selection and Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year. He is a professor of English at the University of Toronto.
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