Four

inspiration

Misc

kerplunkk // cunning linguism

Writing

A.S. Byatt

Background and poem text: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/07/02/patti-smith-jack-kerouac-last-hotel/

DETAILS / POEM TEXT

Patti Smith reads Jack Kerouac's "The Last Hotel"

In this edition of the Faber Podcast we talk to Australian novelist and long-time New York resident Peter Carey. His new book Amnesia is the story of a young female hacker - Gaby - whose Angel Worm virus creates havoc in the Australian prison system, and consequently also in the US, making her Public Enemy Number One. This 30-minute interview covers everything from US/Australian relations (especially post-1975 and America's role in the removal of the Gough Whitlam government), new forms of protest, activism and hacking, and those rumours that Carey was asked to ghost-write the Julian Assange story.

Peter Carey: Amnesia

This week on the Penguin Podcast we’ll be exploring how we remember information, things that have happened and even poetry through memory.  

The Penguin Podcast: Memory feat. Colm Toibin, Jeremy Paxman and Fiona Shaw

"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 The V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize is awarded for the best unpublished short story of the year.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

This week, we welcome novelist Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Sportswriter," "Independence Day," and "The Lay of the Land." Ford comes to NYPL to talk about his latest book, "Let Me Be Frank with You," a fourth installment in his bestselling Frank Bascombe series, which now finds its protagonist struggling to make sense of his past in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

Richard Ford on Becoming a Reader and Finding a Voice

The short story, V.S. Pritchett once wrote, “is exquisitely difficult”. He was speaking, of course, from the writer’s point of view – for readers, short stories are often exquisitely satisfying. Celebrating the presentation of the RSL’s annual V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize, this year’s judges discuss the hazards and joys of writing short fiction.

Adam Mars-Jones published two volumes of short stories, Lantern Lecture, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, and Monopolies of Loss, before being fatally tempted away from concision in fiction with the series novel Pilcrow. Rose Tremain won the Dylan Thomas Award for her first collection of stories, The Colonel’s Daughter, and has published four further volumes of short stories, most recently The American Lover, which comes out in paperback this autumn. Philip Hensher has spent the last two years immersed in short stories as editor of The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, published in October.

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.

V.S. Pritchett Prize 2015 - Philip Hensher, Adam Mars-Jones, Rose Tremain

A discussion on Henry James as critic by Man Booker Prize winner Alan Hollinghurst in conversation with Carlo Gébler.
About the speakers
Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst was born in 1954 and was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. Hollinghurst was on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement from 1982 to 1995. He has published five novels including The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) and The Stranger's Child (2011). His acclaimed novel The Folding Star (1994) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). His novel, The Line of Beauty (2004), traces a decade of change and tragedy and won the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. His new novel, The Sparsholt Affair, will be published in 2017.  He lives in London.
Carlo Gébler 

Carlo Gébler was born Dublin in 1954, the eldest son of writer parents, Ernest Gébler and Edna O'Brien. He has a PhD from Queen's University, Belfast. Gébler has made a number of documentary films and is also the author of several novels, children’s novels, plays for both radio and the stage, and librettos.  He has also worked as a teacher and academic. In the early nineties he was the creative writing tutor at the Maze prison and since 1997 he has been the writer-in-residence in HMP Maghaberry. In addition he has taught creative writing at Trinity College, Dublin, where he has been a visiting fellow four times, and at Queen’s University, Belfast.  Carlo Gebler was elected a member of the Aosdána in 1990.

Alan Hollinghurst in conversation with Carlo Gébler on Henry James as critic

Alan Hollinghurst & Marlon James: Hidden Histories

Author, poet and short storyteller Alan Hollinghurst talking with Marlon James about how fiction can capture lives on the margins of history.


“Someone called me ‘Booker Bruiser Marlon James”


They talked about the differences and similarities between their methods of writing; whether they’d call themselves “writers of gay novels”; who can, and who can’t use adverbs; how sometimes they can’t finish a book, and the relief when they do; and most notably that they were wearing the same socks.

Alan Hollinghurst & Marlon James: Hidden Histories

Speaker(s): Hilary Mantel | Public figures who were once lawyers or law students will speak about how, if at all, their experience of studying, teaching or practising law has been of value to them in their other careers. Hilary Mantel is an award winning novelist and an LSE alumnus. Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:30:00 GMT

Rules of Evidence [Audio]

Preoccupied with memory and place, both physical and emotional, Michael Ondaatje was recently described by the Guardian as 'one of the most innovative and liberating writers of our time'. In a conversation interwoven with readings, he talks to Fiammetta Rocco, editor of Books and Arts for The Economist about his life and work. 


Time Around Scars (Michael Ondaatje)

May 2, 2010 | French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), Tinker Auditorium | NYC

With Colm Toíbín and Christos Tsiolkas

Christos Tsiolkas, the Greek-Australian author of Loaded and The Jesus Man, has created an international scene with his Commonwealth Writer’s Prize–winning novel The Slap, published here this month. Join him and groundbreaking Booker Prize–winning Irish novelist Colm Toíbín, whose books include The Blackwater Lightship, The Story of the Night, and most recently, Brooklyn, for a discussion of some of the common themes that connect their work—from sexual identity to literary taboos.

The Slap: A Conversation with Colm Toíbín and Christos Tsiolkas

Stirling University hosted an evening with perhaps one of the best known Nobel winning poets, Seamus Heaney. Thanks to Stirling for recording the event.

Seamus Heaney at Stirling University

David Harsent, who recently won the Griffin International Poetry Prize for his tenth collection, 'Night', discusses and reads from the work of Seamus Heaney, accompanied with recordings of the Nobel Laureate.

Portraits of Writers Series - David Harsent on Seamus Heaney

Paula Johnson, the RSL's Awards Administrator, chairs the V S Pritchett Memorial Prize 2012, an evening in celebration of the short story. Acclaimed author Jackie Kay discusses the genre of the short story, and the themes within her own work, before reading from her latest short story collection, 'Reality, Reality'. Afterward, Chair of the RSL Anne Chisholm presents Martina Kay with her award for Best Short Story, before the author reads her winning piece.

The V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize Reading 2012 - Jackie Kay & winner Martina Devlin

‘Dalloway Day’, in its second year in 2019,  is a celebration of one of the 20th Century’s most important novels, and seeks to make Virginia Woolf and Mrs Dalloway to London what James Joyce and Ulysses are to Dublin with the annual ‘Bloomsday’. In this event, renowned Woolf scholar Professor Dame Gillian Beer is joined by Alexandra Harris to discuss love and presence in Mrs Dalloway.

Professor Dame Gillian Beer was the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge from 1994 until her retirement in 2002. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature, and was made a Dame in 1998. Among her books are Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground and Alice in Space: the Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll. Alexandra Harris is a writer and academic. Her books include Romantic Moderns, a biography of Virginia Woolf, and Weatherland: Artists and Writers under English Skies.

For There She Was: Love and Presence in Mrs Dalloway_Dalloway Day 2019

THE T.S. ELIOT MEMORIAL MEETING

For Alice Oswald, a poet committed to the live performance of her work, the role of poetry is to go "lower than rhetoric, lower than conversation, lower than logic, right down to the very faint honest voice at the bottom of the skull". Noted for her visionary precision and love of nature, she won the T.S. Eliot Prize for 'Dart' (2002), her poem about the Devon river and the people who live and work on it. But in her most recent work, 'Memorial', she leaves England for the killing fields of Troy, in a reworking of the Iliad described by Andrew Motion as "an elegy of quite extraordinary power". The Classics, and especially Ovid’s Metamorphoses, have also been a lodestone for Robin Robertson. The first person to win the Forward Poetry Prize in all three categories - 'A Painted Field' (1997) was Best First Collection, 'Swithering' (2006) Best Collection, and ‘At Roane Head’ (2010) Best Single Poem - Robertson has been praised by John Banville for his "genius for exact and gorgeous imagery, his dazzling metaphorical gift". In the newly published 'Hill of Doors', he combines loose retellings of stories of the shape-shifter Dionysus with poems about his childhood on the north-east coast of Scotland. It is his most powerful book to date.

We are grateful to Old Possum's Practical Trust for sponsoring this reading.

Alice Oswald & Robin Robertson - March 2013

Founded in 1820, the RSL acts as a voice for the value of literature, honouring and supporting emerging and established writers whilst creating a bridge between authors and audiences of all backgrounds and experiences to engage as many people as possible with the wealth of literature in the UK.

A.S. Byatt

Royal Society Literature