Louis Bayard on ‘The Wildes’

Author Louis Bayard spoke to the Oscar Wilde Society about his new novel The Wildes, which explores the aftermath of Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment, as seen through the eyes of his family. The video includes an introduction by Darcy Sullivan and a short Q&A.

Louis Bayard is an American author and former instructor at George Washington University whose reviews and articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Salon and whose work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. His acclaimed novels include The Pale Blue Eye, adapted into the global #1 Netflix release starring Christian Bale, and Jackie & Me, ranked by the Washington Post as one of the top novels of 2022. The Wildes was chosen as one of the top 10 historical novels of the year by the New York Times and also one of the books of the year by the Washington Post. It is a brilliantly original, profoundly empathetic story about Oscar Wilde’s wife Constance and their two sons in the aftermath of the famous playwright’s imprisonment for homosexuality, told against the backdrop of Victorian England and World War I.