Literary Calendar
Events for September 4, 2013 through September 16, 2013
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Hannah Kent in conversation with Sarah Moss, Daunt Bookshop, Marylebone
Daunt Books is delighted to introduce author Hannah Kent, who will be discussing her superb novel Burial Rites, the most talked about debut of the year. As haunting as it is beautiful, Burial Rites explores the true story of a young woman condemned to death for the murder of her lover in Iceland, 1829. Sarah Moss is the author of Names for the Sea, an extraordinary account of her year living in Iceland with two small children in the same&hellip
African Writers’ Evening: Point of Protest, Southbank
Writers discuss how point of view might be a point of protest in writing about Africa. Africa has been enveloped in centuries of externally imposed myth, often grand and romanticised with rarely any space for the voices of the mundane. The fact of any individual voice emerging, having its own humour, expressing awareness of its place, can be seen as an act of protest. Following in the tradition of writers such as Mongo Beti, whose Poor Christ of Bomba caused&hellip
Deborah Levy and Juan Pablo Villalobos, Keats House
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” – Leo Tolstoy With razor-sharp humour and curiosity, celebrated authors Deborah Levy and Juan Pablo Villalobos explore the meaning of family and belonging. Deborah Levy’s novel Swimming Home was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012, and her latest collection of stories, Black Vodka, has been shortlisted for the International Frank O’Connor Award. From swans with a sinister sleeping sickness to a forest outside Prague, Black&hellip
An Evening with Ruth Rendell at The Rose Theatre
Next year Ruth will celebrate her 50th anniversary as a published writer. This is a unique opportunity to hear Ruth Rendell talk about her long and successful career in writing wrongs, and to hear about her new Wexford novel No Man’s Nightingale. Ruth Rendell will be in conversation with Peter Kemp, Fiction Editor at The Sunday Times. More information/book tickets
Eleanor Catton, Southbank
Eleanor Catton, prize-winning author of The Rehearsal, presents her definition-defying second novel, The Luminaries. Eleanor Catton, born in 1985, is the author of The Rehearsal, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, longlisted for the Orange Prize, winner of the Betty Trask Award and published in twelve languages. Tonight she presents her second novel, The Luminaries, a work of fiction that combines murder mystery, historical adventure and astrological puzzle… a breath-taking piece of storytelling where everything is connected&hellip
Multiples: Adam Thirlwell with Tash Aw, A.S. Byatt and Joe Dunthorne, LRB
Is it possible that translation could be an optimistic art? In an effort to experiment with this possibility, the novelist Adam Thirlwell, on behalf of McSweeney’s Quarterly, invented an experiment: what would happen if a story were successively translated by a series of novelists, each one working only from the version immediately prior to their own – the aim being to preserve that story’s style? The result was a compendium of 12 stories, in up to six versions each, in 17&hellip
Damian Barr at Polari, Southbank
The LGBT literary showcase, with Damian Barr reading from his acclaimed memoir Maggie & Me. Heading the bill in September, Damian Barr is joined by Lois Walden, Bernardine Evaristo, Susie Boyt and Nick Field. Also tonight, the shortlist for the Polari First Book Prize 2013 is announced. Described by the New York Times as ‘London’s most theatrical salon’, LGBT literary showcase Polari returns. Polari gives a platform to the best in established, new and up-and-coming LGBT literary talent and performance. More information/book tickets
Samuel Beckett and Judaism, LJCC
For virtually all of his life Irish playwright Samuel Beckett was personally connected with the Jewish people. This presentation will explore those connections and highlight traces of a hidden Jewish context and wartime suffering in Waiting for Godot and other postwar works. More information/book tickets
Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet with Harry Eyres
The writer and journalist Harry Eyres brings you an evening of essential life advice from Horace, the ancient poet who coined the phrase ‘carpe diem’. He reveals how Horace can help us navigate our way through life, love and leisure. The humble son of a freed slave, Horace championed the saving grace of modest pleasures: poetry, leisure and wine. His writing has much to say about how to live now. For him, poetry, therapy and friendship are all related. ‘Happy is she or he&hellip
Why critics don’t take funny books seriously with John Crace and Lucy Mangan, LJCC
Critics sometimes remark on the humour in novelists such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens as if it’s a quality of the writing the reader needs permission to enjoy. Meanwhile many other books that are hailed as comic masterpieces barely raise a smile. What makes humour the poor relation of so much literature? And is it time to take comedy rather more seriously? This is part of the Highgate & Hampstead Literary Festival. More information/book tickets
Deborah and Lottie Moggach talk to John Crace, LJCC
Deborah Moggach’s new book, Heartbreak Hotel (all reviews here) is a warm, wise and funny romp in the Welsh countryside, which will appeal to the legions of fans who enjoyed the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Lottie Moggach’s Kiss Me First (all reviews here) is a moving coming of age story hidden within a harrowing mystery. While Lottie explores a lot of dark territory – suicide, alienation, innocence betrayed – she has also written an unexpectedly warm-hearted novel. This is part of the Highgate & Hampstead&hellip
Charlotte Mendelson talks to Claire Armitstead, LJCC
Charlotte Mendelson has just been long listed for the Man Booker Prize for Almost English (all reviews here). She will be talking to Guardian Books and News Editor, Claire Armitstead. Charlotte Mendelson’s last novel, When We Were Bad, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and was chosen as a book of the year in the Observer, Guardian, Sunday Times, New Statesman and Spectator. She is also the author of Love in Idleness and Daughters of Jerusalem, which won both the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Almost&hellip
A Shed of One’s Own: Midlife without the Crisis with Marcus Berkmann, LJCC
For many men, middle age arrives too fast and without due warning. One day you are young, free and single; the next you are bald, fat and washed-up, with weird tendrils of hair growing out of your ears. With age should come dignity and respect, but instead comes tired jokes about buying a motorbike. Marcus Berkmann isn’t having it. Having marked his fiftieth birthday by hiding under the duvet for six weeks, he is determined to find some light in&hellip
Hunters in the Snow with Daisy Hildyard, LJCC
After his death, a young woman returns to her grandfather’s farm in Yorkshire. At his desk she finds the book he left unfinished when he died. Read all the reviews for Hunters in the Snow. Part story, part scholarship, his eccentric history of England moves from the founding of the printing press into virtual reality, linking four journeys, separated by the centuries, of four great men, the exiled Edward IV, Tsar Peter the Great, the former African slave Olaudah Equiano and&hellip
Fifty Shades of Feminism with Susie Orbach & Lisa Appignanesi, LJCC
Fifty Shades of Feminism is the antidote to the idea that being a woman is all about submitting to desire. Co- editors Susie Orbach and Lisa Appignanesi discuss their selection of fifty women for this inspiring new volume; young and old, writers, politicians, actors, scientists and mothers – their reflections on the shades that inspired them and what being women means to them today. This is part of the Highgate & Hampstead Literary Festival. More information/book tickets
Andrew Wilson talks to Henry Kelly about Mad Girl’s Love Song, LJCC
Fifty years after her death, Andrew Wilson explores the life of Sylvia Plath before her marriage to Ted Hughes, in an intimate portrait of the brilliant and tragic literary enigma based on her early poems, letters and diaries. Drawing on exclusive interviews with friends and lovers and using previously unavailable archives and papers, this is the first book to focus on the early life of the twentieth century’s most popular and enduring female poet. Andrew Wilson is a journalist who has&hellip
Maggie O’Farrell talks to Olivia Lichtenstein, LJCC
It’s July 1976. In London, it hasn’t rained for months, water comes from a standpipe, and Robert Riordan tells his wife Gretta that he’s going round the corner to buy a newspaper. He doesn’t come back. Read all reviews for Instructions For a Heatwave Maggie O`Farrell is the author of five previous novels: After You`d Gone; My Lover`s Lover; The Distance Between Us, which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Vanishing Act Of Esme Lennox; and The Hand That First Held Mine,which won the 2010 Costa&hellip
Salley Vickers talks to Melissa Katsoulis, LJCC
Salley Vickers is the author of the word-of-mouth bestseller Miss Garnet’s Angel and several other bestselling novels including Mr Golightly’s Holiday, The Other Side of You and Dancing Backwards as well as a collection of short stories Aphrodite’s Hat. She has worked as a cleaner, a dancer, a university teacher of literature and a psychoanalyst. She is currently a RLF fellow at Newnham College Cambridge and she divides her time between Cambridge and London. Melissa Katsoulis is the author of Telling Tales: A&hellip
Sophie Hannah, Sabine Durrant & Christopher Fowler talk to Peter Guttridge, LJCC
Three of our best contemporary thriller writers discuss their craft with crime fiction critic Peter Guttridge. The Carrier is a compulsive puzzle of a novel from Sophie Hannah that has you hooked from the very first page, Sabine Durrant’s Under Your Skin is an unpredictable, exquisitely twisty story, which proves that you should assume nothing, believe no one and check everything, while Christopher Fowler’s latest novel, Bryant & May and The Invisible Code won the eDUNNIT Crimefest Award and is shortlisted for the CWA Dagger in the&hellip
5 x 15 at The Tabernacle
Unscripted true stories of passion, obsession and adventure with Louis de Bernières, Olivier James, Cerys Matthews, Mark Cocker and Sara Rankin. More information/book tickets