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

Crime writer Ruth Rendell gave a Masterclass to fourteen participants for the RSL/Booker Prize Foundation series, on 22 June 2013. Here, she speaks to RSL Events Manager Lucy Clouting about her work and gives her top tips for writers.

Ruth Rendell interviewed by RSL Events Manager Lucy Clouting

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

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/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?

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)

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

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

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

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]

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

Poets, novelists, playwrights and painters across the centuries, looking up at the same skies and walking in the same brisk air, have felt very different things. Drawing on writers from Chaucer to Ian McEwan, from the creator of the Luttrell Psalter in the 14th century to John Piper in the 20th, Alexandra Harris’s Weatherland, published this autumn, builds on small evocative detail to explore the ways in which the weather is daily recreated in the human imagination.

In a talk co-hosted with the National Portrait Gallery, introduced by the biographer Anne Chisholm, and accompanied by slides of the writers and artists whose work she explores, Harris shows how we experience weather physically, emotionally and spiritually. Harris’s first book, Romantic Moderns (2010), traced connections between some of the most brilliant artists and writers of the 20th century, and won the Guardian First Book Award.

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

Writing in the rain

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

Julian Barnes, winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, discusses the fascination of crime and detection, his feelings about England and 'Englishness', and why writing remains not just a pleasure but a necessity with Kate Summerscale.

An Unofficial Englishman (Julian Barnes & Kate Summerscale)

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)

Born in the Gorbals in 1955, Carol Ann Duffy has been Poet Laureate for the past eight years. Her poems blend humour and warmth with sharp social commentary and are on GCSE and A-level syllabuses.Her work has been garlanded with prizes, including the Forward Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize and the PEN/Pinter Prize. She reads alongside two emerging poets whose work she admires. Since starting to submit his poetry to journals three years ago, Keith Hutson has had work published in Magma, The North, The Rialto and Stand. His debut pamphlet, Routines, has recently been published by Poetry Salzburg. Mark Pajak, born in Merseyside, has had poetry published in Magma, The North and The Rialto, and won first place in the 2016 Bridport Prize. His first pamphlet, Spitting Distance, was selected as a Laureate’s Choice and is published with smith|doorstop. The readings are introduced by Tim Robertson, Director of the RSL and features Young People's Laureate for London Caleb Femi.

We are grateful to the the T.S. Eliot Estate for sponsoring and for the Roehampton Poetry Centre for co-hosting this event.

Annual T. S. Eliot Memorial Reading Carol Ann Duffy

How has the intersection of race, feminism and class evolved since the 1980s? Reni Eddo-Lodge is a young, black, feminist journalist who burst on to the literary scene with her 2014 blog post ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race’, which went viral. Her first book – of the same title – was lauded by Man Booker winner Marlon James as ‘one of the most important books of 2017’. Both personal and political, it shines a torch on to the many manifestations of racism in Britain, which she describes as a country ‘still profoundly uncomfortable with race and difference’. Heidi Safia Mirza is Professor of Race, Faith and Culture at Goldsmiths. She is the author of many trailblazing, best-selling books including Race, Gender and Educational Desire: Why Black Women Succeed and Fail (2008). Their conversation is chaired by award-winning novelist and critic Bernardine Evaristo, whose books of fiction and verse fiction explore the African diaspora from multiple perspectives. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University, London, and a Vice Chair of the RSL.

Why Race Matters

Muriel Spark was one of the greatest fiction writers of the 20th Century – named no. 8 in The Times list of the greatest British writers since 1945. Her novels include Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Mandelbaum Gate and A Far Cry from Kensington. Though she published an autobiography – Curriculum Vitae – in 1992, she remained an enigma even to some who thought they knew her well. In Spark’s centenary year, in a talk chaired by Robin Baird-Smith, who was her publisher for ten years, Ali Smith reflects on a writer of genius.

Muriel Spark At 100

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

On International Women’s Day 2019, three women working in the fields of business, law and politics discuss affecting change through writing, and what it means to be a woman with influence. Baroness Helena Kennedy is a leading barrister and expert in human rights law. In her 1992 book Eve Was Shamed, which was re-issued in 2018, Helena Kennedy examines the pressing evidence that women are still being discriminated against throughout the legal system. Gina Miller is a political campaigner and businesswoman who initiated the legal case challenging the British government over its authority to implement Brexit without approval from Parliament. Her memoir Rise: Life Lessons in Speaking Out, Standing Tall & Leading the Way was published in 2018. Rachel Reeves has been MP for Leeds West since 2010. Her book on 100 years of women in parliament, The Women of Westminster: MPs who Changed Politics, will be published in 2019.

Women In Power

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

Thirty years ago, the Berlin Wall was pulled down. With the resurgence of interest in the boundaries and borders of nations across the world, is the symbol of that wall still potent in 2019? Do walls and censorship go hand-in-hand? For Banned Books Week, David Hare and Ben Okri discuss the history of real walls and their impact on writing, and how imagined walls figure in literature. David Hare is a playwright and film-maker. He has written over thirty plays which include Plenty and Skylight. His many screenplays include The Hours, The Reader and the Worricker trilogy. Ben Okri is a poet, novelist, essayist, short story writer and playwright. His novels include the Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road, the first in a trilogy, and The Freedom Artist, published in 2019.

Their conversation is chaired by Samira Ahmed  – a freelance journalist, writer and broadcaster at the BBC, where she presents Radio 4's Front Row and Newswatch on BBC1. She is the host of the Intelligence Squared podcast ‘How I Found My Voice’

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.

Walled In - Banned Books Week 2019 (David Hare and Ben Okri)

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Claude Mckay and Leonard Woolf's 1917 Club – 4 Gerrard Street

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