THE COSMO DAVENPORT-HINES MEMORIAL MEETING

Writing a memoir is something most people leave until they are old and grey, with a life's work behind them; but Tracey Thorn and Damian Barr are just 50 and 36 respectively. Tracey Thorn's beautifully written, faintly wistful Bedsit Disco Queen, published in February, traces her development from shy, self-conscious teenager to internationally acclaimed pop-singer - one half of Everything But The Girl - and offers fascinating insights into the highs and lows of stardom. Damian Barr, prize-winning columnist, writer, playwright and presenter, is the founder of the Shoreditch House Literary Salon, and Maggie & Me, published this month, is his heartbreaking, heartwarming account of what it was like to grow up gay and in deep poverty in Thatcher's Britain.

In a conversation chaired by Susannah Clapp, theatre critic of the Observer, and interspersed with readings from their memoirs, they reflect on what moved them to look back on their lives so soon, explore the relationship between memory and imagination, and exchange views on the Iron Lady and her legacy.

Damian Barr and Tracey Thorn on midlife memoir

Travelling Light: A Celebration of Gavin Ewart (Fleur Adcock)

Though Edith Wharton is more closely associated with France and Italy, she also had a passionate and complex feeling for England all through her life. In this talk, Hermione Lee traces Wharton's connections, through friendships, places and houses, to this country. Chaired by Helen Simpson.

The Road not Taken: Edith Wharton's English Life (Hermione Lee)

Alexander Bubb - WB Yeats

Alexander Bubb - Main Quadrangle of UCL

Alexander Bubb - Red Lion Square

Susheila Nasta - Russell Square Underground/Tour Begins

Susheila Nasta - North East corner Gordon Sq

Susheila Nasta - Fitzroy Tavern / Fitzrovia

Romesh Gunsekera - Poetry London Offices

Romesh Gunsekera - Tavistock Square

For nearly 50 years, the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch wrote prolifically, establishing herself as one of the great British fiction writers of the twentieth century. Novelists A.S. Byatt, Bidisha and Philip Hensher, all of them powerfully influenced by Iris Murdoch, reconsider her standing as a writer. Chaired by Anne Chisholm.

Iris Murdoch Revisited (A.S. Byatt, Bidisha, Philip Hensher)

THE RSL & BATH SPA UNIVERSITY DISCUSSION

A leading novelist of the post-war era, Angus Wilson provided a sharp and often very funny portrait of Britain during this period. He shared with E.M. Forster a concern with the problems of liberal humanism, while his elaborate plotting and rich characterisation recall the works of Dickens. Unusually for a male novelist of his time, he placed women at the centre of several books - notably 'The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot' (1958) and 'Late Call' (1964) - while 'Hemlock and After' (1952) and 'Anglo-Saxon Attitudes' (1956) were among the first British literary novels to portray homosexual characters without fuss or special pleading. In Wilson's centenary year, biographer Peter J. Conradi, who knew him well over many years, chairs a celebration of his work. Ian McEwan was one of the first students on the creative writing MA established by Angus Wilson and Malcolm Bradbury at UEA; Wilson's friend Margaret Drabble wrote his biography; the literary journalist Edmund Gordon represents a new generation of admirers.

We are grateful to Bath Spa University, our partners in this event, and to The Bloomsbury Hotel for their support.

Angus Wilson: A Celebration

Travel writer Colin Thubron allows the personal to break cover in his prose for the first time in his new book, 'To a Mountain in Tibet'. He talks to Victoria Glendinning about his journey to the world’s most sacred mountain, about loss and grief, and about whether a journey can ever be a cure. Chaired by Michael Holroyd.

To a Mountain in Tibet (Colin Thubron & Victoria Glendinning)

On Valentine’s Night, three of our Fellows – Wendy Cope, Jackie Kay and Hugo Williams – read and reflect upon their favorite poetry about love, both from their own and others’ work.  Chaired by Piers Plowright.

Speaking of Love (Wendy Cope, Jackie Kay, Hugo Williams)

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

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.


The Sri Lankan Novel

Seamus Heaney in conversation with Bernard O'Donoghue about his life and the influences that inform his work , with Nick Laird, Andrew O'Hagan, Jon Stallworthy and Jo Shapcott reading selections of Heaney's work.


A Life in Poetry (Seamus Heaney)

Mark Doty, who was born in Maryville, Tennessee, and now lives in New York, was the first American poet to win the T.S. Eliot Award, and is a former winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. He first came to public attention with work exploring gay identity and the AIDS epidemic. Deep Lane, published this spring, is a book of descents – into the earth beneath the garden, and into the dark substrata of life. It ranges from agony to rapture, from great depths to hard-won heights. Ruth Padel, a former winner of the National Poetry Competition, was shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Award for Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth, a book on conflict, harmony and creativity, weaving contemporary Middle Eastern politics and the history and culture of the Abrahamic religions, with music and craftsmanship. At its heart is a sequence on the Seven Last Words of Christ from the cross. Introduced by Fiona Sampson, Director, Roehampton Poetry Centre, our co-hosts for this event, Doty and Padel read from their work.

Mark Doty photo by Renato Pensold.

Tale of two cities

In 1807, the British turned their backs on the Atlantic slave trade, though for 150 years they had grown fat on its proceeds. Why did they change their minds about it? And what significance should we attach to it?

The Slave-trade Remembered (James Walvin, David Dabydeen)

THE ROY JENKINS MEMORIAL MEETING

Should we take Anthony Trollope seriously? Are Barchester Towers, Phineas Finn and The Way We Live Now comfort reading for addicts of the heritage industry and TV costume drama, or is Trollope up there with Dickens, Hardy and the Brontës: exponents of the Victorian novel at its most incisively original?

Was Trollope the victim of his own indefatigable industry and dedication to his craft? And what does he have to say to 21st-century readers? In an event marking the bicentenary of his birth, and chaired by the biographer and novelist Jonathan Keates, MP and historian Kwasi Kwarteng, poet Michael Symmons Roberts and novelist Joanna Trollope examine his reputation, his surprising narrative range and his often audacious and strikingly humane treatment of controversial themes and characters. Choosing their own favourites from the Trollopean canon, the panel considers whether Leo Tolstoy was right when he exclaimed, 'Trollope kills me, kills me with his genius.'

What's so great about Trollope?

Why do we need to sleep? What effect do the various phases of sleep have on our unconscious minds? How can we interpret our dreams? And what is the relationship in writing between being 'awake' and 'asleep', in terms of what a writer knows and doesn’t know about what they are doing?

This discussion is chaired by the poet Lavinia Greenlaw, who was the first artist in residence at the Science Museum. Novelist Jonathan Coe’s works include The House of Sleep, described by the late Malcolm Bradbury as 'moving, clever, pleasurable, smart'. Professor Russell Foster FRS is head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford. His research studies the way in which light regulates our 'body clock' and the implications for productivity and health. Deborah Levy is a playwright, novelist and poet with a particular interest in the subconscious. Her novel Swimming Home (2011) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. 'The seductive pleasure of Levy’s prose,' wrote one critic, 'stems from its layered brilliance.'

Sleep talking

A.S. Byatt, Colin Thubron, Helen Simpson and Ben Okri consider four very different aspects of love: love as enchantment, and love as madness; passion in youth, and compassion in old age. They read their favourite passages on love both from their own work, and from the work of other, discussing Shakespeare's notion that 'The lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact'.


Speaking of Love (A.S. Byatt, C. Thubron, H. Simpson, B. Okri)

Rowan Williams’s fascination with Russia goes back to his boyhood, and to watching the films of Sergei Eisenstein, which evoked for him a sense of strangeness, tragedy and extremes. As a teenager, he embarked on Russian literature, beginning with Fyodor Dostoevsky, whom he found profoundly and deeply compelling. While Archbishop of Canterbury, he then took a three-month sabbatical to write Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (2010). In this talk, he explores the “thread of wildness” that runs through Dostoevsky’s characters, what they have to teach us about human anguish and responsibility, and why “the Russian dimension” has been, and remains, central to his theological thinking and his life of prayer.

Chaired by Sara Wheeler.

We are grateful to Robert Skidelsky for sponsoring this event.


On Dostoevsky

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)

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)

20 years on, how have the Harry Potter books changed the landscape of children’s literature and permeated our cultural consciousness? Journalist Nicolette Jones, children's author Katherine Rundell, Publishing Director of Children's Publishing at Bloomsbury, Rebecca McNally, and social commentator Shami Chakrabati discuss the Harry Potter effect.

The Harry Potter Effect

Following the publication of La Belle Sauvage, Philip Pullman talks with Erica Wagner – author, critic and former literary editor of The Times – about his writing life, and about the books that helped shape him. Philip Pullman is one of the best-loved and most highly acclaimed children’s authors in the world, and his books are consumed by readers of all ages. He has won numerous awards, including the Whitbread Book of the Year. He has also become known for his views on Christianity, our education system and the role of the author in public life. He is, in his own words, ‘a passionate believer in the democracy of reading’.

We are grateful to Richard and Jenny Davenport-Hines for sponsoring this event in memory of their son Cosmo.

Philip Pullman - Literature Matters:The Democracy Of Reading

Set on ‘a Wednesday in mid-June’, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (like James Joyce’s Ulysses) takes place over the course of a single day. Virginia Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee talks to novelist Alan Hollinghurst about Woolf’s legacy and influence, especially on his most recent novel, The Sparsholt Affair. During this celebration of one of the 20th Century’s most important novels, literary critic Elaine Showalter, author of the seminal A Literature of their Own, and Sarah Churchwell, Chair of Public Understanding in the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, discuss the significance of Mrs Dalloway and its ongoing influence on literary culture.

Dalloway Day 2018

November 2018 marks 100 years since the end of the First World War. The RSL is marking this anniversary by looking back to Wilfred Owen’s words for peace, and looking forward to how poetry today can take us towards a more peaceful future. We have commissioned 14 of our poet Fellows to respond to Wilfred Owen’s life and work and to the theme of peace. The resulting anthology is called Peace Poetry.

One of the commissioned poets, Sabrina Mahfouz, reads her poem ‘Peace < Water’.

Sabrina Mahfouz, Peace < Water

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1995, Seamus Heaney said, ‘I credit poetry because credit is due to it, in our time and in all time, for its truth to life, in every sense of that phrase.’ Five years after his death, we celebrate the lasting power of Heaney’s verse, his ability to ‘credit marvels’, and his enduring presence in the work of poets writing now. Inua Ellams is a poet, playwright and performer. He is a Complete Works poet alumnus and was elected an RSL Fellow in 2018. Sinéad Morrissey has published six books of poetry and was Assistant Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. She is now Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Andrew O’Hagan, prize-winning novelist, and friend of Seamus Heaney, chairs the evening’s readings. 
 
We are grateful to the T. S. Eliot Estate for sponsoring this event, and a series of new commissioned writing in response to the NPG’s Seamus Heaney portraits.

Truth To Life

Uncanny and unsettling, with wild landscapes and violent characters, Gothic fiction is as popular today as it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this event, novelists Sarah Perry and Kate Mosse discuss the distinct appeal of the genre, using history as a source of inspiration, and how writing the Gothic has changed in the last two centuries. Sarah Perry is the author of After Me Comes the Flood, The Essex Serpent and Melmoth. Her second novel sold over 500,000 copies in the UK alone and was the Waterstones Book of the Year 2016. Kate Mosse is an award-winning novelist, playwright and non-fiction writer, the author of six novels and short story collections, including the multimillion-selling Languedoc Trilogy, and number one best-selling fiction The Winter Ghosts and The Taxidermist’s Daughter. Kate is the Founder Director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and is currently working on the next novel in The Burning Chambers series. Their conversation is chaired by writer, academic and critic Shahidha Bari.

Modern Gothic

Three of this country's best loved short-story writers - Bernard MacLaverty, EA Markham and Helen Simpson - read from their new collections and discuss their work, asking whether stories need adhere to strict rules, and speculating as to whether the future of the short story is bright or bleak. Chaired by Georgina Hammick.

Short Stories: Beginning, Middle or End? (Bernard MacLaverty, EA Markham, Helen Simpson)

Novelist and critic Margaret Drabble, psychotherapist Jane Haynes, and poet and translator Ian Patterson, discuss their love of Proust with Christopher Prendergast, who recently oversaw the major new translation of Proust's 'À la recherche'.

What's so great about Proust? (Margaret Drabble, Jane Haynes & Ian Patterson)

Roger Robinson reads his poem 'On Nurses' - taken from his RSL Ondaatje Prize winning poetry collection A Portable Paradise.

The annual £10,000 RSL Ondaatje Prize is for books - fiction, non-fiction, poetry - that best evoke the spirit of a place.

The 2020 judges are Peter Frankopan (Chair), Pascale Petit and Evie Wyld.

Illustration by Liang-Hsin Huang.

On Nurses_ Roger Robinson

While walking through London, in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf, Monica Ali concludes that ‘trying to get the measure of London is futile. Better to do as Woolf does and catch at thoughts and feelings, the immediate perception of things, so  as to be able to say, like Lily Briscoe in To The Lighthouse, Yes, I have had my vision.’ While time may have changed the city, Woolf’s nuanced way of capturing a moment or a place, in all its immediacy, has influenced generations of writers after her. Why does Virginia Woolf continue to be such a powerful point of reference for writers working today? And why does she still have so much to show writers about themselves? 

For the 2019 Dalloway Day – a whole day dedicated to the celebration Woolf’s one-day novel Mrs Dalloway – Monica Ali, Elif Shafak and  Patricia Waugh discuss Woolf’s influence and the challenges of interpolating one of the 20th Century’s most significant writers in works inflected by their own lives.

After Woolf, with Monica Ali and Elif Shafak - Dalloway Day 2019

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Ken 'Snakehips' Johnson – Café de Paris, Coventry Street

Does a writer’s work grow or diminish as it is remade? Does the experience of adapting another’s work change a writer’s approach to adaptations of their own? And is the process of adaptation a collaboration? Max Porter’s verse novel Grief is the Thing with Feathers was adapted for the stage by Enda Walsh in 2018 in a production that went on to tour internationally. In 2019, on the publication day of his second novel, Lanny, it was announced that Rachel Weisz would produce and star in the film adaptation. Inua Ellams’ adaptation of Three Sisters, playing at the National Theatre until February 2020, takes Chekhov’s play into 1960s Nigeria and the Biafran War. In 2020, Inua is also creating an afro-futurist reimagining of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince with Fuel Theatre Company. In this event, Max and Inua explore the creative afterlives of texts, lives the writer might have imagined – or not. Their discussion is chaired by Online Editor of Guardian Books, Sian Cain.

We are grateful to the TLS for supporting this event.

Remaking The Remarkable

Of writing biography, Hermione Lee has said, ‘There is a tension between the muddle and repetition and fragmentariness of a life, and the desire of the biographer to turn it into story narrative.’ How does a biographer make sense of a life’s complexities? In this event, four writers consider experimental life-writing and the limits of biography. Lara Feigel is a literary critic and Reader in Modern Literature at King’s College London. Her most recent book, Free Woman, is part personal memoir and part biography of Doris Lessing. Delia Jarrett Macauley is the author of the novel Moses, Citizen and Me, winner of the 2005 Orwell Prize, and a biography of the writer and first Black woman employed by the BBC, Una Marson. Anthony Joseph is a poet, novelist, and musician. His most recent book, Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon, combines fact with the imaginative structure of the novel. They are joined by biographer and critic Hermione Lee, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, whose work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and Penelope Fitzgerald.

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

Writing Lives

The Royal Society of Literature is a cultural organisation based in London. The aim of the RSL is to nurture, celebrate and defend Britain's outstanding tradition of writing. To this end it organises public lectures and debates, makes awards to new and established writers, and campaigns for the encouragement and appreciation of authors.

Popular tracks by Royal Society Literature