Literature

Empress Dowager Cixi, who effectively controlled the Manchu Qing Dynasty from 1861 to 1908, was responsible for transforming China from a medieval to a modern state. At the age of 16, she was chosen as one of the emperor's concubines; after his death in 1861, she launched a palace coup against the regents appointed to rule for their five-year-old son. Working from court records, official and private correspondence, diaries and eye-witness accounts, Jung Chang, bestselling author of 'Wild Swans', and 'Mao: The Unknown Story', has written a groundbreaking biography of the dowager empress. On the day of its publication, she talks to Colin Thubron, President of the Royal Society of Literature, about how Cixi fought against monumental obstacles to change China, how she abolished foot-binding and inaugurated women's liberation, and how she fell in love with one of her eunuchs, with tragic consequences.

We are grateful to the Legatum Institute for sponsoring this event.

Jung Chang in conversation with Colin Thubron: October 2013

THE ROY JENKINS MEMORIAL MEETING

As we approach the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, two writers encourage us to remember that, despite fighting each other in two terrible wars, Britain and Germany share centuries of deep friendship. Philip Oltermann, deputy editor on the Guardian comment desk, is the author of Keeping Up with the Germans, an interweaving of memoir and history, published earlier this year to outstanding reviews. The biographer Miranda Seymour's forthcoming publication 'Noble Endeavours' is a moving exploration of 400 years of Anglo-German relationship and forgotten friendships, told through the stories of people at all levels of society, from kings to students. Chaired by John Jungclaussen.

John Jungclaussen, Philip Oltermann and Miranda Seymour on Anglo-German relations: October 2013

Roddy Doyle and the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize 2013

Novelist and short story writer Margaret Drabble discusses the ethics of portraiture, the public versus the private image, the defining of character in paint and prose, and the many faces of Doris Lessing.

This event was part of 'Portraits of Writers', a series of talks in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery, to coincide with the exhibition 'On Paper: Portraits of Writers'.

Portraits Of Writers Royal Society Of Literature - Margret Drabble on Doris Lessing

THE HAWTHORNDEN LECTURE

In 1948, the novelist and poet Jack Kerouac coined the name 'Beat Generation' for an underground, anti-conformist youth movement in New York. In the decade that followed, works such as Kerouac's On the Road, Allen Ginsberg's Howl and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (the last two sparkling obscenity trials that ultimately revolutionised American publishing) formed a distinct 'Beat' literature. Iain Sinclair has been described by the Daily Telegraph as 'one of our most dazzling stylists', and American Smoke, published this month, completes the trilogy he began with Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire and continued with Ghost Milk. In a talk introduced by novelist and screenwriter Deborah Moggach, he conducts a memory interrogation, touching on the past meetings, lost archives, chance discoveries, volcano obsessions and fated decisions of the Beats.

We are grateful to the Hawthornden Charitable Trust for sponsoring this event.

Ian Sinclair on the Beats

THE TAGORE MEMORIAL MEETING

'Pakistan produces people of extraordinary bravery,' Nadeem Aslam has written, 'but no nation should ever require its citizens to be that brave.' His sentiment is shared by Kamila Shamsie, and the work of both novelists has focused on the human cost of conflict in their homeland. Nadeem Aslam was born in Pakistan, and experienced the devastation of General Zia's martial rule before his family fled to Huddersfield when he was 14. He has traced the plight of his compatriots from small-town Pakistan in 'Season of the Rainbirds' (1994), to the north of England in Maps for 'Lost Lovers' (2005), and back again in 'The Blind Man's Garden', published earlier this year. Kamila Shamsie grew up in Karachi, and many of her novels - 'In the City by the Sea', 'Salt and Saffron', 'Kartography' and 'Broken Verses' - have centred on struggles in her hometown. In a conversation chaired by essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra, Aslam and Shamsie discuss writing fiction, set in Pakistan and beyond, during the 'war on terror' years.

We are grateful to the Robert Gavron Charitable Trust for sponsoring this event.

The Pakistani novel today

THE RSL/FIRST STORY DISCUSSION

There is much talk about social mobility, but little evidence of it in Britain today. Seven per cent of children attend private schools, but they account for 54% of FTSE 100 CEOs, 70% of High Court judges and 61% of Booker Prize-winning novelists. In an evening jointly hosted by the RSL and First Story, Jonathan Dimbleby asks whether the literary world is becoming increasingly closed. Alan Johnson, Home Secretary under Gordon Brown, recently published This Boy, remembering a childhood of Dickensian poverty in 50s London. Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English, drawing on his youth on a Luton council estate, was shortlisted for the Man Booker. Kate Fox is a stand-up comedian, poet, writer, and First Story Writer-in-Residence at Feversham College, Bradford. Salena Godden is a performance poet, writer, and First Story Writer-in-Residence at Highbury Grove School, London.

We are grateful to the London Evening Standard, our media partner for this
event.

Silver spoons: can you write without one?

‘I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated,’ Penelope Fitzgerald once wrote. She considered herself one of these, and despite great early promise lived much of her life in drudgery and near destitution. Then, in her late 50s, she began to write. Over the next two decades, she not only published three biographies, but nine brief and brilliant novels, four of which were shortlisted for the Booker, Offshore winning it. At 80, Fitzgerald found fame both sides of the Atlantic. Chaired by Hermione Lee, whose widely acclaimed biography of Fitzgerald was published last autumn, and who will speak about her life, three writers celebrate one of the great writers of the 20th Century, and one of the most fascinating. Biographer and critic Susannah Clapp, who regularly edited Fitzgerald’s work at the LRB, considers her biography of the poet Charlotte Mew. Penelope Lively, who was a friend, talks about The Gate of Angels. Alan Hollinghurst looks at Offshore, a novel based on Fitzgerald’s experiences of living on a leaky houseboat on the Thames.

We are grateful to the Royal Literary Fund
for sponsoring this event.

On Penelope Fitzgerald

Margaret Atwood began writing poetry in high school, and the most thrilling moment of her writing career was the publication of her first poem: ‘I mean, all the other things that have happened since then were a thrill, but that was the biggest.’ She has gone on to publish 19 collections of poetry, as well as 14 novels – including 'The Handmaid’s Tale', 'The Blind Assassin' and 'MaddAddam', published last summer. Organised and methodical in writing fiction, she writes poetry ‘in a state of free float’, very often in hotel rooms or on planes. Her poems tend to begin with a cluster of words, around which they form – she has compared the process to ‘dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation’ – and sometimes they result in novels. In a conversation with Peter Kemp, Chief Fiction Reviewer of the Sunday Times, Atwood talks about how she believes that poetry and fiction use different parts of the brain, explains how poems can open doors into rooms which novels then enter and explore, and reads from her work.

We are grateful to the Canadian High Commission in the UK for hosting this event at Canada House. We are grateful to the TLS for supporting this event.

Margaret Atwood reads her poetry

One hundred years after the outbreak of the Great War, Peter Parker introduces four writers, and the pieces of First World War literature that mean most to them. Poet and fiction writer Tobias Hill looks at Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. The Irish poet Michael Longley, whose father was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry during the First World War, reads from the poetry of Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon and Edward Thomas, as well as his own war-inspired work. Timberlake Wertenbaker, whose most recent play, Our Ajax, looks at the trauma of modern warfare, explains how she was
marked by Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy. And Louisa Young, author of the bestselling First World War novel My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You, considers The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West.

Voices of the Great War

Last October, the New Zealand novelist Eleanor Catton became the youngest ever winner of the Man Booker Prize. Her epic 832-page murder mystery' The Luminaries', set in the New Zealand gold rush of 1866, has been praised as ‘dazzling, luminous, vast’, ‘carefully executed, relentlessly clever, easy to read’, and ‘breathtakingly ambitious’. The novel, which each of the Man Booker judges read three times, combines intricate plotting with compassionate wisdom about the human condition. At an exclusive London event – jointly hosted by the RSL, the Australia & New Zealand Festival of Literature & Arts and Intelligent Life magazine – Robert Macfarlane, bestselling travel writer and chair of the 2013 Man Booker judges, interviews Catton for the first time. He asks how she did it, and what comes next.

Eleanor Catton in conversation With Robert Macfarlane

THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION/RSL SERIES: MEETING 2

Best remembered for her Moomin books, the Finnish writer Tove Jansson (1914-2001) is also celebrated for her adult fiction. But where do books for children end, and books for adults begin? Can an author’s writing invite the states of adulthood and childhood to merge and address each other? Jansson was inspired to create the Moomins after an argument about the philosopher Immanuel Kant; The Summer Book, a luminous novel for adults, explores the relationship between a six-year-old girl and her aging grandmother. Ali Smith is a prizewinning novelist, and has written introductions to several of Jansson’s books. Thomas Teal, who spent time with Jansson on her summer island in the 1970s, has translated six of her books, including The Summer Book. In 2009 he won the Bernard Shaw Prize for his translation of her novel Fair Play. To celebrate Jansson’s centenary, in a discussion chaired by Kate Kellaway, Smith and Teal look at her life and work, and the effect her characters have on readers of all ages.

On Tove Jansson

THE T.S. ELIOT MEMORIAL MEETING

W.H. Auden once called poetry “a way of happening”, and in his own work the way was a marvellous one, striking a deep, popular chord. His “Funeral Blues” provides the only moment of gravity in Four Weddings and a Funeral; “September 1, 1939” was faxed around New York in the aftermath of 9/11. For Alexander McCall Smith, creator of the bestselling No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, Auden has for many years acted as a kind of invisible moral tutor, informing his responses to fundamental questions about life. In What Auden Can Do for You, published last year, he argues that this great poet can enhance the lives of all of us. Edward Mendelson, who corresponds with the fictional sleuth Isabel Dalhousie in McCall Smith’s novel The Right Attitude to Rain, is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is literary executor of Auden’s estate, the editor of several collections of his work, and the author of many books about him. In a conversation interspersed with readings, they discuss what Auden has meant to them personally, and the ways in which he continues to speak to us more than forty years after his death.

We are grateful to Old Possum's Practical Trust for sponsoring this event.

Auden and us

Please note: this recording contains some strong language.

Sir Richard Eyre, who ran the National Theatre from 1987 to 1997, is this country’s most distinguished director of film, theatre, television and opera. His numerous triumphs include the noted 1982 revival of Guys and Dolls, his recent version of Ghosts, the musical of Mary Poppins, and the film of Zoe Heller’s novel Notes on a Scandal. They also include a number of never-to-be-forgotten productions of Shakespeare: Hamlet, with Jonathan Pryce in 1980 and with Daniel Day-Lewis in 1989; Richard III with Ian McKellen; King Lear with Ian Holm; and the recent television version of Henry IV Parts 1 and II. In celebration of Shakespeare’s 450th birthday, Sir Richard reflects on the challenges and rewards of bringing his plays to stage and screen.

We are grateful to the National Portrait Gallery, our partner for this event. 

Living with Shakespeare (Richard Eyre)

If Virginia Woolf came back to life today, what would she make of it? How would she feel about what’s happening to books, and to the reputation of her own books, and of the Bloomsbury group?  The acclaimed novelist Maggie Gee, whose thirteen previous books include The White Family, My Cleaner and My Animal Life, this month publishes her new novel, Virginia Woolf in Manhattan, which imagines what ensues when an author working in the New York Public Library becomes so passionate about Woolf that she suddenly materialises. In a conversation chaired by Anne Chisholm, biographer of Frances Partridge, the long-lived Bloomsbury diarist who remembered Woolf from her youth, Maggie Gee discusses her novel with Alexandra Harris, author of Romantic Moderns, which explores connections between some of the 20th Century’s greatest writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, Eric Ravilious and John Piper, and of a short biography of Woolf. They reflect on her imaginings of both past and future, and ask what she means to readers and writers today. Is she, for women writers in particular, a hard act to follow?

We are grateful to the Royal Literary Fund for sponsoring this event, and to the Bloomsbury Hotel for supporting it.

Virginia Woolf in the 21st Century

THE COSMO DAVENPORT-HINES MEMORIAL MEETING

Tens of thousands of novels are published in the UK every year – so how do new voices get heard? Two well-established authors, Michael Holroyd and Deborah Moggach, introduce two outstanding young writers with novels coming out this month. Karin Altenberg’s first novel, Island of Wings, was set on St Kilda, and was shortlisted for the Saltire First Book Prize. Her second, Breaking Light, is set on Dartmoor. ‘I am a hard rock of a reader,’ says Michael Holroyd, ‘but this has more than once moved me to tears.’ Jessie Burton’s debut, The Miniaturist, set in the 17th Century, follows a young woman as she travels to Amsterdam to marry an illustrious merchant trader, and finds herself in a closed and dangerous world. It is, says Deborah Moggach, ‘complex, involving and deeply atmospheric’. As well as talking about their own work, Altenberg and Burton ask Holroyd and Moggach about their lives in literature. Michael Holroyd’s novel A Dog’s Life, started when he was 19, is re-released today (rather too hurriedly, he believes), and Deborah Moggach’s Tulip Fever – also set in 17th-century Amsterdam - is currently being made into a Hollywood film.

This meeting is generously sponsored by Richard and Jenny Davenport-Hines, and is held in memory of their son Cosmo.

Beginning, middle and end

"I began my literary career with short stories," A.L. Kennedy wrote recently. "I banged together my first anthology … and a publisher actually inflicted it on a waiting world." Since the publication of that first collection in 1990, Kennedy has produced five more – her most recent, All the Rage, published earlier this year – and six novels, including the Costa Prize-winning Day. The Sunday Telegraph has called Kennedy "one of the most brilliant writers of her generation" and her prose has been described in the Observer as “pure, full of tenderness and courage". In conversation with Paula Johnson, who runs the RSL's prizes, Kennedy reads from her work, and explores the craft of the short story. The V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize is awarded for the best unpublished short story of the year. After the announcement and presentation of the V.S. Pritchett Prize for 2014, the winning entry will be read by its author.

We are grateful to ALCS for supporting this event, to Christopher and Jennie Bland for sponsoring the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize, and to Prospect for publishing the winning entry.

A.L. Kennedy on the craft of the short story

The 9 November 2014 marks a quarter of a century since East and West Germans tore down the wall that had separated them since 1961. The anniversary has inspired two outstanding books. Maxim Leo grew up in East Berlin and was 19 when the Wall came down. In Red Love, described in the Sunday Telegraph as “beautiful and supremely touching”, he shows how his parents’ marriage was derailed by ideological difference, and how the GDP continues to haunt his family like a “ghost that can’t find peace”. Rory MacLean has known three Berlins: West Berlin, where he made movies with David Bowie and Marlene Dietrich, East Berlin, where he researched his bestseller Stalin’s Nose, and the unified capital. Berlin: Imagine a City is an intimate biography of the city from medieval times to the present, told through the lives of 23 of its former residents. Jan Morris called it “a wonderful achievement … hauntingly representing, as in a tangled dream, 600 years of history”. In an event co-hosted by the European Commission, they revisit the reality and myth of the Cold War capital, and explore its remarkable capacity for reinvention.

This event is held in partnership with the European Commission in the UK.

In Berlin

Published last year, Lucy Hughes-Hallett's 'The Pike' scooped three major prizes for non-fiction: the Samuel Johnson, the Duff Cooper and the Costa Biography Award. Her subject, the Italian poet and soldier Gabriele D'Annunzio, was a debauched artist who became a national hero, and as one critic put it his life "becomes more repellent with each page". Richard Davenport-Hines, the author of highly praised studies of Proust and Ivy Compton-Burnett, international drug traffickers and the Profumo Affair, has also written about the lives of Jack the Ripper, Robert Maxwell, Lord Lucan and Dr Shipman. In a conversation chaired by Selina Hastings, acclaimed biographer of Evelyn Waugh, Rosamund Lehmann and Somerset Maugham, they ask whether sinners are more easily brought to life on the page than saints; whether living with a dark character gets a writer down, or makes them feel better about themselves; and how they think they would have got on with their chosen monsters in real life.

Writing about monsters

Ever since Sinbad the Sailor washed ashore there, Ceylon – now Sri Lanka – has drawn writers and storytellers from all over the world. But it is only in the last 20 years or so that Sri Lankan literature has come to international attention. Romesh Gunesekera grew up in Sri Lanka and the Philippines. His first book, Monkfish Moon, was a collection of short stories reflecting the ethnic and political tensions that have threatened Sri Lanka since independence in 1948. His second, 'Reef', was shortlisted for the Man Booker. Earlier this year, he published 'Noontide Toll', a novel set a post-war Sri Lanka still haunted by trauma. V. V. Ganeshananthan is a fiction writer, essayist and journalist whose 'Love Marriage' (2008), about two Tamil families in Sri Lanka and North America, was longlisted for the Orange Prize. In a conversation with BBC journalist Razia Iqbal they discuss the long shadow that war has cast over Sri Lankan literature, the challenges of writing fiction in the context of a troubled political climate, and the connection between writers living in Sri Lanka, and those of the diaspora working in Canada, America, Australia and the UK.

We are grateful to the Robert Gavron Charitable Foundation for sponsoring this event.


Literature

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