LITERATURE

As part of the 2013 series of RSL Booker Prize Foundation Masterclasses, Peter Kemp, Chief Fiction Reviewer of the Sunday Times, spoke to fourteen participants about reviewing literary fiction. Here, RSL Director Maggie Fergusson interviews Peter about writing reviews.

Peter Kemp interviewed by RSL Director Maggie Fergusson about reviewing literary fiction

As part of the RSL/Booker Prize Foundation Masterclass series, Adam Foulds gave a class on 'bio-fiction' on 8 September 2012. Here, RSL Events Manager Lucy Clouting interviews him about his work and his top tips for aspiring biographical and historical fiction writers.

Adam Foulds on biographical and historical fiction

Of the thousands of books published in Britain each year, only a handful are translated from foreign languages. Given the dominance of English as the international language of business and politics, perhaps our literary chauvinism is inevitable. Does this narrowing of our reading world matter? Are we in danger of missing out on today's Tolstoy or tomorrow's Murakami? Novelist Adam Thirlwell has recently masterminded 'Multiples', a globe-trotting collection of 12 stories, translated in and out of English and 17 other languages by 61 authors. He chairs a conversation between three champions of translated literature - the writer and francophile Julian Barnes, the novelist Ali Smith, and Irène Némirovsky's translator, Sandra Smith - as they discuss the challenges of Anglocentricity, the relationship between authors and their translators, and the role of translators in shaping our cultural imagination and inheritance.

We are grateful to Portobello Books for sponsoring this event, and to the TLS for supporting it.

Julian Barnes, Ali Smith, Sandra Smith & Adam Thirlwell on translated literature

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

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

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

Critic, academic and biographer, John Carey, has had access to a wealth of previously unpublished material in writing his book on William Golding. To mark its publication, he reflects on some of the influences that shaped the author of "Lord of the Flies". Chaired by Claire Tomalin.

Wlliam Golding: the making of the novelist (John Carey)

Hilary Mantel and David Profumo discuss the motives that drove them to write in intimate detail about their own families in their memoirs and the very particular challenges they faced in doing so.

Bringing the House Down (Hilary Mantel & David Profumo)

Charles Nicholl reflects on the challenges and pleasures of discovering the human figure behind Leonardo da Vinci's sometimes obscuring label of 'Universal Genius' - by delving into little known corners of Leonardo's notebooks and manuscripts, Nicholl provides a fascinating insight into his private life. Chaired by Philip Hensher.

In Search of Leonardo (Charles Nicholl)

Sebastian Faulks talks to Jane Thynne about how a novelist can keep learning new skills, the all-important narrative ‘voice’, his novel in progress, and the challenge of simply ‘being’ other people.

Hearing voices (Sebastian Faulks)

Adam Phillips reflects on the relationship between creativity and mental health, asks whether we try too hard to be happy, and explores his belief that psychotherapy is ‘a king of practical poetry’ in a conversation with Joan Bakewell, one of the country’s most highly respected broadcasters.


All in the mind (Adam Phillips & Joan Bakewell)

'I am a grower of stories. I farm them as surely as a farmer does his corn. I am a weaver of dreams, a teller of tales.' Michael Morpurgo discusses his path to becoming an author and reads one of his stories. Chaired by Jacqueline Wilson.

A Story-maker's Journey (Michael Morpurgo)

Simon Sebag Montefiore explores Stalin’s treatment of writers and their work, and considers the effects on himself as a writer of spending several years in the company of a man whom he describes as ‘part-intellectual, part-brigand’ in a talk chaired by Colin Thubron, who has been drawn repeatedly to the former Soviet Union in his travels.


Stalin and the writers (Simon Sebag Montefiore)

In 'White Mughals', which was awarded the 2001 Wolfson Prize for History, William Dalrymple departed from travel writing to relate the romantic and ultimately tragic tale of a passionate love affair that took place in eighteenth-century India, and that transcended all the cultural, religious and political boundaries of its time. He talks  with Colin Thubron, a travel writer and novelist. 



Travelling Across Genres (William Dalrymple & Colin Thubron)

In this talk, she asks how Eliot tested  a variety of lives in his masterpiece, Four Quartets. How do writers, or risk-takers like his ancestor Andrew Eliot, or Londoners during the Blitz, or members of a religious community, hold up against Eliot's pattern of the perfect life: 'a lifetime burning in every moment'?

TS Eliot and the search for perfection (Lyndall Gordon)

Claire Tomalin looks at the background, language and themes of Pepys' diary, and at how it relates to his life as a whole. Chaired by John Carey.

Pepys: the making of a diarist (Claire Tomalin)

Originality in science is synonymous with being first; originality in the arts is somewhat different.  At what point do these two creative endeavours overlap?

Originality (Ian McEwan)

Two well established poets, David Harsent and Lavinia Greenlaw, and two younger poets, Emma Jones and Ahren Warners, reflect on who and what first drew them to poetry, and ask tough, practical questions: how does a young poet go about getting work published? How important is it to have an agent? What are the pros and cons of self-publishing? And is it possible to make a living from poetry?

Being A Poet (Lavinia Greenlaw, David Harsent, Emma Jones & Ahren Warner)

The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and the award-winning poet Fiona Sampson discuss poetic and religious language, both of which operate outside the usual conventions of description or analysis. Together, they consider the different kind of ‘pressure’ at work in these two modes.


Language Under Stress (Rowan Williams & Fiona Sampson)

Grace comes with contemplation — inspiration and creativity move the world.

"(-) The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. "
Steve Jobs

LITERATURE

Claudius