The artist and writer Edmund de Waal is turning the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in Oxford into a single, sunrise-to-sunset event. The Day of Psalms, which he has curated as Schwarzman Cultural Fellow, brings together music, poetry, spoken word, visual art and craft.
It opens at 7 am with Blue Hours, performed by GBSR Duo, the percussionist George Barton and pianist Siwan Rhys. From there the programme follows the light. Colin Currie Group will play Steve Reich’s Tehillim, and Aurora Orchestra will perform Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. Nico Muhly has written a new piece for the occasion.
The words are covered too. Katherine Rundell will talk about the life and work of John Donne, including his writing on the psalms. Exiled Writers Ink will run poetry workshops.
De Waal will give an illustrated talk on his own exploration of the Psalms, and on the fellowship that led to the day itself. Visitors can also see another hour, his large-scale sculptural installation first shown at Southwark Cathedral in 2014. The work takes the monastic hours as its subject, the idea that the psalms are repeated again and again across a single day.
In the Great Hall, he will lead a hands-on workshop open to everyone. The aim is to make a new Psalter for the Bodleian Library, built by the people who turn up.
Alongside the ticketed programme, free drop-in events will run throughout the Centre’s public spaces, including pop-up performances and short talks. Oxford academics taking part include Susan Gillingham, Emeritus Professor of the Hebrew Bible, and Wes Williams, Professor of French Literature. Henrike Lähnemann, Professor of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics, is on the list, as are Elizabeth Apps of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and Karen Leeder, Professor of Modern German Literature. Audrey Southgate, Lecturer in Old and Middle English, Christian Leitmeir, Professor in the Faculty of Music, and Dr Andrew Dunning, R.W. Hunt Curator of Medieval Manuscripts at the Bodleian, complete the group.
De Waal, born in 1964, is a CBE. His art deals with memory, materiality and diaspora, and has been shown at the Frick Collection in New York, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the V&A in London. He is probably best known for The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), the family memoir that won the Costa Biography Award and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. The White Road followed in 2015 and Letters to Camondo in 2021. His new book, How to Begin (2026), recounts the start of a creative life through the letters exchanged between his grandmother and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
His books have been translated into 30 languages. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2021 and a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2024. He lives and works in London.