Lee A. Siegel
Lee A. Siegel is a novelist and professor of religion at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is not related to the critic Lee Siegel. In 1988 Siegel was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow [1]. He has received numerous fellowships and grants including five Senior Research Fellowships from the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Smithsonian Institute (1979, 1983, 1987, 1991, 1996), four research grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council (1982, 1985, 1987, 1990) and one from the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies. In addition Professor Siegel has been two Presidential Awards for Excellence in Teaching (1986 and 1996). He has been a scholar-in-residence at the Rockefeller Foundation, and twice at the Bellagio Study Center (1990 and 2003). He also was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College of Oxford University (1997).
Siegel has published a number of novels including: Who Wrote the Book of Love, Laughing Matters, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his novel, Love in a Dead Language. His most recent novel is Love and the Incredibly Old Man (2008).
His son is film actor Sebastian Siegel.
“You can learn to do anything in the world if your life depends on it and if you can read.”
“Everyone needs to be deceived and, provided it doesn't cost too much, wants to be fooled.”
“Each reader of the same text, like each lover of the same woman (or the other way around), modulates that text, transforms that lover, finds in it/her/him something that has never been discovered before. ”
“We enter into a relationship with any text we hear or read, like the relationship with a friend, a lover, or an enemy. A relationship is the ultimate meaning of the text.”