YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE
The Arts Club of Washington is pleased to announce that Rachel Corbett is the
recipient of the eleventh annual Marfield Prize, the National Award for Arts
Writing, for her book You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke
and Auguste Rodin (W. W. Norton & Company).
“This empathetic and imaginative biography, deeply researched, is anchored by
the friendship between two of the twentieth century’s greatest artists.”
The New Yorker
Corbett travels to Washington in May for a brief residency, including a free
public discussion of her book at the club on May 3 at 6:30 p.m., and the
Marfield Award Dinner on May 4 at 6:30 p.m., an event for club members and their
guests hosted by television and radio personality Robert Aubry Davis, one of the
judges for the award. Corbett also will meet with students at a local public
high school and participate in an interview with Grace Cavalieri, host of the
Library of Congress’ podcast, “The Poet and the Poem.”
“You Must Change Your Life wondrously reveals a neglected relationship between
two masters of their art forms, the elder reinventor of sculpture at the turn of
the 20th century, Auguste Rodin, and the visionary German poet Rainer Maria
Rilke,” Davis says. “Rachel Corbett has woven this tale of their lives, and the
women who were crucial in this story, with all the rough-hewn muscularity of a
Rodin masterpiece merged with the twilight grace of a Rilke poem.”
Rachel Corbett is editor in chief of Modern Painters magazine. Her writing also
has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, The Art Newspaper, New York
Magazine, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. You Must
Change Your Life is her first book.
