Dressed in black and based in the US, Neil Gaiman has, in the past decade, become an author hero among readers of all ages, including the 1.8 million who follow him on Twitter. In prize-winning, best-selling novels including Coraline, Neverwhere, American Gods and The Graveyard Book, he combines the everyday and the other-worldly, drawing on sources from English folklore, science fiction, fantasy, horror and fairytales to rock music and the Midrash. An element of enchantment runs through all his work. To mark the publication of The Ocean at the End of the Lane, an unsettling and very personal fable about memory, magic and survival, he is making one public appearance in London. Interviewed by the Guardian's literary editor, Claire Armitstead, he reflects on the boundaries between children's and adult literature; the appeal of working in multiple forms - such as comics, picture books and screenplays; the writers - from Kipling to Edgar Allan Poe - who have most influenced him; and the lure of darkness.

The Guardian  is media partner for this event.

Neil Gaiman in conversation with Claire Armitstead: June 2013

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)

How do novelists and poets approach so contentious a subject? A panel consisting of writers who have published books about violent political events and their consequences - Adam Foulds, Chris Petit and Kamila Shamsie - considers the ethical and aesthetic challenges of creating art from such material.  Chaired by Pankaj Mishra.

Literature and Political Violence (Adam Foulds, Pankaj Mishra, Chris Petit, Kamila Shamsie)

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 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

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

Should we rake through painful experiences, and try to learn from them, or are they best forgotten? Why is the truth so often buried in secrets? And how much should we keep from the people we love? These are some of the questions posed by Andrew O'Hagan's fifth novel, The Illuminations, a story of love, memory and war. In collaboration with Faber Social, we present an evening of readings, music and performance. Andrew O'Hagan shares the stage with novelist, poet and playwright Edna O'Brien, whom Philip Roth has described as 'the most gifted woman now writing in English'; and performance poet Kate Tempest, winner of the Ted Hughes Award, and shortlisted for the 2014 Mercury Music Prize. With music from James Yorkston.

Contains strong language.

Reflections On War With Edna O'Brien, Andrew O'Hagan And Kate Tempest [Part 1]

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)

Seahorses are among the most popular species at London Zoo, and they provide a crucial barometer in measuring the health of the oceans. Yet comparatively little is known about them. Opening the third season of writers' talks at the zoo, Authors for Animals, former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion considers a creature with a rich mythical existence, and a real life that is at once beautiful, intriguing and precarious. In an event introduced by the poet Jo Shapcott, herself a passionate conservationist, a ZSL keeper tells anecdotes about seahorses’ habits and husbandry, and a ZSL scientist talks about threats to the species and work being done to support seahorses in the wild. Andrew Motion then responds to the creatures imaginatively, reading from his poetry about this curious, beguiling species, and giving us his own take on its importance to humanity.

Andrew Motion 'Consider The Seahorse'

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 his BBC series ‘The Face of Britain’ historian and writer Simon Schama explored British portraiture and what it revealed about the ‘individual and collective psyche’ of the time. With the NPG’s wide-ranging Autumn exhibition of Picasso’s portraits, he turns his attention to the painter’s evocations of lovers, family and friends. With writer and novelist Lisa Appignanesi, Chair of the RSL, Schama reflects on some of the differences between representing character in words and on canvas.

We are grateful to the National Portrait Gallery, our partner for this event.

Picasso's Faces

In the wake of accusations of antisemitism in the British political sphere, four writers explore the portrayal of Jews in American literature and ask how such evocations might affect social perceptions. Zachary Leader is the biographer of Saul Bellow, whose Herzog and Sammler acquired iconic status. Devorah Baum lectures at the University of Southampton and is the author of the forthcoming Feeling Jewish, which wrestles with the emotions of Philip Roth’s characters among many others – as well as her own. Howard Jacobson is the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. His novels, including The Mighty Walzer and Kalooki Nights, have put perceptions of and by Jewish characters centre-stage. The conversation is chaired by Adam Thirlwell, novelist and London editor of the Paris Review.

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

Feeling Jewish

Alan Ayckbourn has been a playwright for 58 years, and to date has written 80 plays, including Relatively Speaking, How the Other Half Loves, Absurd Person Singular and The Norman Conquests. In 1997 he was knighted for services to theatre, and he has won numerous awards. With Peter Kemp, Chief Fiction Reviewer for The Sunday Times, he explores the way his work combines comedy with underlying seriousness, using humour to treat themes such as emotional inhibition, isolation, failures of communication and tension within families. We also hear about influences on his writing, his working routines and his ongoing fascination with technical experimentation.

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

Eighty Plays On: Alan Ayckbourn in Conversation

Nearly 30 years after Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding following the publication of The Satanic Verses, former campaigners in his defence come together with writers and activists to talk about their fight for freedom of expression then and now. Melvyn Bragg is an acclaimed writer and broadcaster, and presented 'The South Bank Show' for ITV from 1978 to 2010. Frances D’Souza is a member of the House of Lords and former chair of the International Committee for the Defence of Salman Rushdie. Caroline Michel has been CEO of Peters Fraser and Dunlop literary agents since 2007. Yasmin Rehman is  CEO of GrIP (Greenwich Inclusion Project) a strategic race equality and hate crime organisation based in London and is a Fellow of the Muslim Institute. Their conversation is chaired by Lisa Appignanesi, novelist, campaigner for free expression and Chair of the Royal Society of Literature.

This is a Banned Books Week event, in partnership with the British Library, Free Word and Islington Library and Heritage Service.

Standing with Salman

Elaine Showalter discusses the enormous impact of the Brontës - through Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Vilette and Mrs Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë - on American women's writing in the 19th century: writers black and white, novelists and poets, from Emily Dickinson to Sarah Orne Jewett, who used the lives and novels of the Brontës as inspirations for American stories.  Chaired by Ion Trewin.

American women writers & the Brontes (Elaine Showalter)

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

Tracy Chevalier was catapulted to fame with the publication of her second novel in 1999. Girl with a Pearl Earring, inspired by Vermeer’s portrait of the same name, sold five million copies worldwide and was made into a film starring Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson. Chevalier has a particular way of approaching visual art. Easily overcome by ‘gallery fatigue’, she makes a quick tour of an exhibition, before returning to spend time with the one or two paintings – very often portraits – that have struck her most forcibly. Then she allows her imagination to work on them until stories begin to emerge. In a conversation illustrated by slides, Chevalier speaks to writer, journalist and broadcaster Nicolette Jones, shares some of her favourite paintings and reflects on the tales they tell.

We are grateful to the National Portrait Gallery, our partner for this event.

Heads And Tales

In the run up to the LSE Festival: Beveridge 2.0, rethinking the welfare state for the 21st Century, we bring together a panel to discuss the relationship between literature and poverty. They reflect on questions such as: do you need money to access literature? If not, why are there comparatively few working-class writers? And can literature actively play a part in reducing financial hardship? Kit de Waal, author of My Name is Leon and editor of the forthcoming Common People: An Anthology of Working Class Writers will be joined by playwright, novelist and short story writer Paul McVeigh and Aaron Reeves, Associate Professorial Research Fellow at the LSE, whose work looks at the causes and consequences of social, economic and cultural inequality. The conversation will be chaired by journalist Sarah Shaffi.

Can literature solve poverty?

What compels writers to share their private stories? Rupert Christiansen’s memoir, I Know You’re Going to be Happy, tells of the devastating consequences of his father’s abandoning his wife and children in the 1950s. Christiansen chairs a discussion with three fellow memoirists. Aida Edemariam’s book about her Ethiopian grandmother, The Wife’s Tale, is published in February. Sigrid Rausing’s Mayhem: A Memoir attempts to show another side to the tabloid headlines of her sister-in-law’s fatal overdose. Philippe Sands is the author of East West Street, a memoir of his grandfather, two legal professors, the city of Lviv, and an examination of the legacy of the Nuremberg Trials.

On Memoir

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

Marking 50 years since the Lord Chamberlain was stripped of his power to censor plays, three theatre writers examine playwriting in the UK and freedom of expression. The panel, including director Sir Richard Eyre and playwrights Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, Ella Hickson and Gillian Slovo, will explore the development of British playwriting since the end of censorship in 1968. The speakers will discuss whether the change in legislation heralded a change in artistic expression at the end of the 1960s, notable productions which have caused controversy since, and whether playwrights in the UK today are still troubled by censorship.

This is a Banned Books Week event in partnership with the British Library, English PEN, Free Word, Hachette UK, Index on Censorship, Islington Council's Library and Heritage Service, Libraries Connected, Media Diversified and The Publisher’s Association.

Lifting The Curtain

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

The Joyce trail has led Tom Staley around the world: to Dublin a dozen times; to Paris; and to Trieste, where 'Dubliners' was completed, 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' written,and 'Ulysses' begun. He reflects on these journeys, his studies, and his enduring passion for the genius of Joyce. Chaired by Roy Foster.

A Life with Joyce (Tom Staley)

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)

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

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

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.

Popular tracks by Royal Society Literature